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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.
If fast travel is going to be limited why can we fast travel a caravan to loot
Knotti
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Just as the title reads why is it that we can fast travel one of the most integral parts of the game. We should have to build and already have a caravan on the road with our raid to pick up the loot we gain.
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Comments
Could be just place holder, but in general i agree with you. Or send someone to a node where they can grab one, while defending the loot.
All the while timers are not final.
Having the caravan show up seems perfectly fine for me. it's the only realistic way to engage with that mechanic imo. To win the bandits need to destroy the caravan. Without a caravan certain goods cant be moved between nodes.
caravans are absurdly slow and it makes no sense to waddle around with an empty one hoping you stumble into someone else with a full one.
That would create a good back and forth between the two forces, and may require reserves being called up to assist.
If the timer is too short, it may be impossible to recover items, which could decrease any interest in caravans at all - rendering the whole feature useless.
I’m glad we have a real Alpha to suss this out.
what you are forgetting is that they make faster caravans so if you wanted faster travel use one of those.
Fast relative to other carriages. and these will have much smaller inventory spaces. Also, I think you are seeing caravans as a strictly group oriented content. From what I have heard and understand, there will be incentives to join the defense of random caravans you encounter rather than just attacking them. So I fully expect many defending and attacking parties to be a mash of solo and small groups of players. The developers seem to feel that its better for the flow of the game for you to be able to call a caravan over to collect up defeated caravan loot.
Think of the alternatives, The first one being you are required to bring an entire raid that can bring along materials to build the carriage on the spot. I say an entire raid because it sounds like you will not accept any easy way of doing it such as 1 to 3 people needing to carry the materials.
The second alternative is running around with an empty carriage. They are slow as hell, even if you grab a "fast one" you would need to run around with multiple of them and from what we know you can spot caravans from a very far distance away. so you are doing one of two things, sitting at choke points with a massive cluster of caravan icons giving away your position, or two, roaming around the open world with a massive cluster of caravan icons giving away your position.
Now, I would need you to actually explain a different way to have the carriage with the bandits without it requiring them all to be in a premade prior to the caravan attack and for this new method to not cause searching for caravans to be a massive boring time waster.
There's this ^ and the fact that Steven - if you re-watch the video for the part where he goes to summon it - had supposedly already crafted/gotten together a caravan to be ready to use; There's to be effort ahead of time, *if* the attackers/raiders are going to try to take the loot to town, to get more out of it.
Am predicting most successful Caravan attackers will just divie-up the loot between their backs for lesser rewards, though.
Not all caravans traveling with loot will be using the slower high armour caravan in the small example given. Perhaps they will be using small and faster caravans.
I believe a horse on its own will be considered a caravan type with storage and will have some speed to collect defeated loot. People also have bag space of their own. No I will not accept the easy way of doing this as it's been stated many times by Steven himself this will not be a game for casuals. Any sort of a summon is considered fast travel no matter how long it takes. If the raid can bring the resources and components and build one on the spot that is totally fine but it should function as a group* casted summon to do so.
If the bandits are out scouting in a small group such as the group of rangers that initiated the battle in the video of the small scale example that they have shown. They can perhaps before the engaging call for a larger raid or maybe multiple alliance raids to come help with the attack. I feel like searching for caravans will take some time as the maps will be an unprecedented size that will take some comprehending.
the game technically is for casuals (not exclusively) according to the wiki.
Depends of how accessible you want caravan raiding to be. The effort it takes the defenders to maneuver a caravan to a location is mirrored for the attackers if they have to bring one too.
In effect with good scouting and redirecting you can make it extremely hard for the attackers to ever have a caravan in place and ready.
Its not a terrible idea but it does swing the advantage heavily over to the defenders.
If you use the "construct the caravan option" you'll have a fixed period of time always, but it's fun and kinda strategic to take into account the waiting time for the caravan to arrive.
If the marauders choose to transfer the crates to a new caravan, then this is how I think that system should change:
Get rid of the whole "call an entire caravan to spawn right next to me out of nowhere after standing around for five minutes" thing. I have to be perfectly honest and say that it's horribly, terribly immersion breaking, boring, and lazy. Is there a bit of a thrill in knowing you could be attacked again while waiting for it to show up? Eh, sort of, but odds are, the people you attacked won't really regroup and strike again until your new caravan arrives. Anything beats just standing around doing nothing in a video game for minutes on end during a period of time that's supposed to be an adrenaline-rush.
In lieu of this system, I think marauders should have to bring their own form of transportation for stolen goods. If they want to transfer it all straight into a new caravan, they'll need to have their buddy drive a caravan over from the nearby village for them, or have it hiding behind the hill they all pour out from when they launch their attack. Alternatively, they could bring along a few hand-carts that can hold up to a few crates each, but move a little bit slower for each crate they're holding, or some beasts of burden that can carry crates over their backs like panniers. From there, players will have to go the rest of the way to their selling destination on foot, or just make for the nearest town that has a friendly caravan in it if they don't have a full one with them, and then launch it as their own after the fact. While traveling, multiple carriers in one raid will just show up as multiple targets on the opposing team's minimaps. If the raid decides to go the beast of burden / handcart route instead of a single caravan, the raid leader can just designate all the stolen crates to be placed in their personal storage, no matter who delivers them, or at whatever town they end up in. Splitting up at this point could be a useful, but risky strategy if securing all the goods seems unlikely.
I also disagree with giving load-bearing vehicles a mass-auto-loot button. Players should have to manually re-load their new vehicles after a raid. It's just a little touch that adds a sense of immersion and requires a bit of team involvement. I think the caravan should have model/animation changes and speed debuffs for every 25% chunk of health taken away, and up to four players at a time should be able to help repair it if they aren't being interrupted by combat (the required time to fully repair reduces with more players actively repairing). I think players should be able to interact with the caravan at the raft conversion site, carry randomly generated bits and bobs from the caravan up the stairs to the raft, and have it slightly speed up the conversion rate per drop off. Lastly, I think they need to get rid of timers for these things and switch to percentage bars for the sake of realism and suspense.
The caravan and other load-bearing vehicles need to be more interactive and influenceable, right now they kind of just feel like moving zergfest zones.
I think the reason they went with the ability to call a caravan rather than having to lug one around with you is that it makes it significantly harder to gank a caravan when your own party has one moving at a snail's pace. With that said, I would like to see them balance rewards so that looting crates is almost never worth doing over keeping them sealed and attempting to complete the caravan route.
Okay this is like the 3rd time I've seen something similar posted. You do not need to use the slowest caravan. There are options for different caravans with a variation of speeds and storage.
That's true, but even the fastest caravan is expected to be slower than a player can travel on a mount. If ganking parties had to lug around a caravan, you would likely see a significant uptick of raid parties that choose to loot crates instead of completing the delivery due to the reduced ability to move back and forth between different routes to scout for caravan parties
Well it sounds like those raids should've brought a caravan if they didn't want to loot the crates. These "Ganking parties" and people doing the work to get the best reward sound like two different things.
I look at the "summons" simply being a CREATE timer.
For the love of- Dude. The caravan system is not designed purely for group players. Thats why you are having this disconnect.
Read it. The only one that will have regular premades will be personal caravans. Even then they will still have many groups spontaneously created when people encounter and choose which side they want to join.
This is why the calling of the caravan needs to be this way. You are trying to get rid of a mechanic that allows both premade and pug groups to smoothly interact with the caravan system. If you have any ideas that dont leave pugs completely dead in the water when it comes to engaging with the caravans, then please by all means share.
It's just summoning a form of transport. And if we're comparing that to summoning a Mount - it takes considerably longer to summon a Caravan than it does to summon a Mount.
I think they have bigger problems to tackle than caravan summoning if they're still intending the system to work this way. How will loot be properly distributed in a random "click here to join" caravan raid? Who gets to call their caravan to pick up all the stuff? Who's to stop randoms from ninja looting the low-tier rewards from all the crates on the ground before someone's caravan arrives? Do you really expect random strangers on the internet without guaranteed voice comms to figure this out during the fight before all the crates hit the floor?
Let's be realistic, reputation only controls people's actions to a certain extent, and when you're all randoms from potentially all over this huge server with thousands of players online at any given time, who's going to really care whether Jon and Jane Doe ninja'd all the crates off the ground during that one random caravan raid the other day while five other randoms were arguing in chat over who should call their caravan to pick everything up?
I think it will matter more than people think atm. Sure, there are up to 10k people online on 1 server. But what matters more is how many are active in your region and with Verra being so huge and no fast travel, I think there is a real case to be made here that ruining your reputation in an area might have greater impact than you think.
Also if someone ninjas crates from a raid, the main force who started the raid can kick them out of the group and kill the betrayer right there on the spot. Additionally there are social consequences which I think are not to be underestimated. A group/guild that stands for upholding ones end of a bargain could (and maybe should) use the block/ignore function to isolate that person from further interacting with them.
Which is why I in the past have been adocating for strong block/ignore functions. The primary one being: If player A is on the block list of player B, they no longer see each others messages but also can no longer trade. Wares offered in auction houses by these people will not be visible, gear, mounts, consumable that have the "crafter tag" of such an ignored player will also no be available. At most they can loot stuff from each other within the regular rule set of the game. That way, psychotic behavior can be answered with signifcant long term consequences. And if someone overuses his block list, they just end up isolating themselves.
There is no "main force who started the raid". It's an automated player-accumulating-system. It just mass invites anyone who's close enough to join one big dog-pile.
As for it mattering more than people think atm, I couldn't disagree more. A lot of people in this forum have been existing in a bubble. We all care about the game more than the vast majority of players will come launch time. A massive number of players will be solo or small-group casuals who couldn't care less how their behavior impacts other people beyond their circle, and who wouldn't really be looking to be admired or even well-liked by a bunch of random other players outside of their little guild, if they even have one.
In a caravan raid of 20-40 random people, even if half or three-quarters of them are in the same guild and on discord together, all it takes is one or two people with an empty inventory to crack open most if not all the crates and snag the contents. It's a public raid group. You can't kick them. Ignoring/blocking them won't stop them from busting open the stolen crates, and it won't stop them from being in future mass-invite groups with you in the future.
I think the mass-invite system for attacking and defending player-driven caravans specifically just needs to go. If you want to attack another player's personal caravan, then you need to form a party and go attack it. Within the caravan PvP zone, all individual entrants into the battle become their own team. That includes individuals, parties, and raids. On each player's screen, anyone currently in the fray who's not on your team will have a red symbol next to their name-plate. The sword and shield could still be used to signal attacker and defender.
At the end of the day, I think the act of making assaults on player-driven caravans needs to be a pre-organized affair only, with multiple opposing teams allowed to go at it at once, so that every involved party agrees on who's allowed in their group, who's going to be the caravan driver if the assault is successful, where they're going to be delivering to, and that they trust the delivery person to pay them their fair share. I just can't think of any way to keep payouts fair for a bunch of random people hopping into the fray at different times, some contributing more while others contribute less, and with no voice chat or defined leader, without completely dumbing down the payout system.
Summoning a mount should be a casted ability that you can't move while doing. The mount should take up a lot of bag space and have the ability to stay fixed in the world with functions like follow, stay put, ability to be traded, if left alone too long it wanders into the wild, and have storage that when used you can no longer put it back in your inventory. Yes this gives it the ability to be ninja'd with the right animal husbandry skills or destroyed. If you want to keep your mount and it's utility - take care of it. Using a mount in battle is risk vs reward, perhaps mostly used by scouts and traveling from a node to the battlefield
A good example of this would be getting ships from missions early on in Eve (an mmorpg for those that don't know about it) all of which can be destroyed/stolen from you.
As for caravans, multiple people can contribute to the cast of a caravan creation to speed up the process (that is if it is being created outside of a nodes caravaneer). A caravan should not only have the ability to be destroyed (attackers) or deconstructed (defenders if they see an incoming raid and choose the option of grabbing all their loot and scattering) but also commandeered with the right combination of skill/items and held for ransom.
Caravans should also not only be a way to transport goods between nodes but also used by groups to simply go out into the world and collect resources to bring back to their own node.
Yes the caravan magically flew through the air in a particle form and appeared on the designated spot. Similar to a summon, which is fast travel. I'm arguing that caravans should be created not summoned.
As far as I remember, it is. It just takes about 3-5 seconds to cast and mount.
It's highly unlikely that a Mount will be part of "bag space".
Mounts can remain in the world and stay put. Yes.
Highly unlikely that Mounts will wander away and become lost to their owners.
Your preferred design for this game simply doesn't match the actual design for the game.
Which should encourage you to do what Steven is doing - become a Creative Director and design a game that you would enjoy playing.
I'm putting forth ideas that I think could benefit the game. If you don't like them don't bother with petty comments.
I don’t think Dygz is being petty, he’s just being a realistic opposition to your position. We’re all equally allowed to have opinions here. I’ve disagreed with Dygz on things as well. That being said, I agree with him on this specific comment - though I disagree with him overall here, in the sense that I believe caravan summoning should be out of the question, as it’s high immersion breaking and sounds horrendously boring to wait around for, when the moment following a caravan getting destroyed should be filled with adrenaline while you get crates loaded up and make your escape.
As for this specific point, mounts are one of those things that are just so iconic and necessary in a large MMO, that to have them be anything more than a specific little whistle in your bag is fairly unrealistic. That sounds like an inconvenience that doesn’t inspire any creative problem solving. It’s just frustrating. It would drastically impact player count if bringing a mount with you made you manage your inventory differently. And forget about losing a mount because it wandered off or got captured by another player. That’s some “drop everything on death” hardcore survival game stuff.
One thing that I think should be different from other MMOs is that if your mount is killed, rather than simply de-summoned, it should take a few minutes for it to be summonable again. That’s enough risk v reward for riding into battle mounted, I think. You risk not being able to make a quick getaway for five minutes or so.