Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
But how is it fun when the defender only have things to lose?
If the attackers winn and then gets killed in a counter attack, then they have lost nothing. Maybe the caravan itself, but no material and no items.
Meaning, that that defenders have the risk vs reward concept, while attackers only have reward to gain and nothing to lose.
again, the question I ask you, did you ever play any MMO with a similar caravan system?
because in every single game with this system there is ALWAYS a lot more people running caravans than attacking them because it is extremely profitable.... Silkroad, Archeage, Albion, EVE, Ravendawn etc etc people will do the thing that gives the most gold per hour, why would you as a large group spend 1h stealing caravans for 30% of the profit instead of running your own for the full amount? Adding all the social aspects like reputation alliances and all that,
Most players will go attacking in their spare time or when they want to mess up with different regions/factions/guilds, not as the primary means of making gold or moving resources,
you don't need risk for attackers look at every other game with this system it always works just fine,
I have not played a mmorpg with a caravan system (or used that type a system actively). But most people will look at the risk of the system and chose the option with good gold/hr and with least amount of interruptions.
Most average player will never use the caravan system since they have everything to lose. They will either attack caravans, or more likely, do something completely different and not interact with the caravan system at all.
People with big guilds and resources to defend the caravan will most likely use the caravan system since they will have the biggest chance of winning. And big PvP guilds will choose to attack caravans for the goods and for the PvP interaction. If pvpers can make life miserable for others and make some gold from it, they will 100% of the time.
Most players will engage with the caravan system in one way or the other with its current setup. I see no glaring issues save the fact that the caravan cant be stopped/slowed down to force a fight, but i digress. Its ok if you dont want to use the system. Plenty others will take the risk, get the extra coin for moving materials, and you can just buy the materials when they show up where you need them.
I made that other thread about the Highwayman system, where I suggest Intrepid differentiate between personal and mayoral caravans.
As long as attackers gain exactly nothing from just destroying a personal caravan, it's ok with me. I think they have to summon their own caravan and transport the stolen crates intact to a node to get any type of reward. That seems fair to me. Cracking open the crates and taking a little something out to sell to the black market should barely give enough gold to cover the expenses for equipment repair. The big payout should come from the unopened stolen crates. The defenders should still be able to load up and transport any left-over open crates to the node, just for less reward and with less goods in them.
As for the type of goods we are most likely to see in the caravans, it's honestly a little hard to say I think. If nodes are dependent on players bringing in a metric fuckton of raw materials and processed goods to prosper, obviously the patron guilds and other significant size guilds in those nodes will run resource caravans all the time. If the majority of resources can come from mayoral caravans, well, the personal caravans will likely be tradegoods more often. Assuming the gold/hr including risk is worth it compared to selling locally.
this Person alone and/or with Agreement of it's Friends - decides to take the Risk. I personally don't see why People should carry any additional Risk by trying to assault the Caravan and loot all the Stuff.
Do they not already "risk" Failure and using their Time for it, despite being able to do something different in the same time ?
With what could they even be additionally punished when they fail ? Dropping Stuff from their Inventory ?
There will only be the usual Droppings as when several People flag Purple anyway, won't they ? Probably not even, because the whole Scene will be a PvP Area anyway.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Maybe i look after a Guild sometime soon
It isnt so much that it needs to be equal risk - and in fact I dont think that would ever be possible.
What needs to happen is that it needs to be an acceptable risk from the perspective of the person starting the caravan.
I think it stands to reason that if players had the opportunity to run a caravan with commodities to make double the profit on them, but that caravan only had a 10% chance of getting through, most players would look at those numbers and nope right out.
The risk factor in that is too high.
That risk factor is made up of a few things. How much you stand to gain if successful, how much you stand to lose if you fail, and what the chances of failing are make up the three largest risk factors.
How much you stand to gain is something that needs to be set by the economic de developer, so isnt really a dial that can be used in this discussion.
This leaves us with only how much you stand to lose if you fail, and how likely you are to succeed being the only real dials left to balance out this risk factor.
The failure cost is what I was mostly talking about in my first few posts in this thread - it is where Archeage sets the balance for trade runs.
In terms of altering the chances of success, there is obviously adding more defenders - but that has it's own cost associated with it (even if only an opportunity cost). There is also making it harder to successfully attack a caravan, but making it so attacks are leas frequent due to increasing the risk for a failed attack also works.
I'm not specifically advocating anything above other than a reduction in the cost of failure - but I am fully aware that each or even all of the above could be employed by Intrepid to balance out the system as a whole.
It wasn't about profit - in a game like Archeage, you get to a point where preventing others making money is a better strategy than making it yourself.
Since that game had a steep curve in probability of failure for gear regrading, if you and your reasonably sized guild were at the point where you all had epic weapons and divine or better armor and the rest of the server was in divine and celestial, preventing (or even just slowing down) their upgrading absolutely a better option than trying to play those odds of getting legendary weapons.
It was actually a sound, statistically correct strategy.
It's also a very good profit/time investment as well. I mean, it's not like you would just sit out in the open ocean waiting for a ship or what ever. Since most players running larger trade runs would stockpile packs (as it would take several days labor to make a full load), it was blatantly obvious where packs were being stored. All you needed to do was keep an eye on these few locations and as soon as you saw someone moving packs at one location, you had a fairly good idea where they would be taking them, and thus where to sit and wait for them.
I see no reason why this wouldn't happen in Ashes. If we see a caravan forming up in a node, there is a good chance we would be able to work out where it is heading, and so setting up an ambush wouldn't be out of the question.
Edit to add; the notion of reputation or social implications really isn't a thing. It was a few decades ago, but it isn't at all now. If the game willingly allows you to do a thing, you can safely do that thing in the game without it hurting your reputation. This may be a reflection on todays gamers, but I am actually more inclined to consider it a reflection on the number of easily exploitable bugs games have had that players have seen go unpunished.
When you compare someone using an infinate money glitch to someone that is taking trade packs, there is only one of these people that should recieve a hit to their reputation.
Now, the risk to merchants exists for a reason: stopping the generation of crazy amounts of gold and resource overflow to keep economy balanced. This risk is great since it favours group gameplay while allowing solo/lowman runs at greater risk without making them 100% impossible. In other words it gives a reason to NOT do caravans BY punishing the merchants on FAILIURE.
When it comes to bandits… there’s simply no reason to not attack a caravan, sin FAILIURE is not punished, if you see a caravan you attack it, even if your are solo, because if you fail nothing will happen to you; if you have some brains you can guess the destination node, rush there form a pug an assault the caravan near the node entrance. Again won’t be hard to set a pug since there’s no reason to not attack a caravan.
We need risk for bandits not to stop attacks from happening, but to even the playing field by not making being a bandit the default option, this will not reduce the amount of pvp but encourage organized assaults.
This has been a discussion on Narc’s discord for days, and some ideas have been gathered over there:
1. Make the bandits have to invest in counterfeit receipts and crowbars to be able to sell/open cargo. These would go on material storage, take a good chunk of it a drop on death, risking the initial investment into the assault.
2. Involving the bounty hunter systems, by placing a bounty, but not corruption, in any bandit that died during a caravan assault, if this bandit dies to a bounty hunter, they get some kind of disabling death penalty.
3. Another important point is stolen goods being put into material storage, risking it to be lost on death.
These are just ideas some terminally online people have put together in 5min, I’m sure the devs can come out with better ones.
Again, the point is not to reduce pvp in caravans, but balancing it by not making being a bandit the default option, which encourages solos and pugs to attack caravans with 0 risk involved, because why not?
PS: A difference in opinion is not a misconception and the OP debunked nothing, I suggest posting feedback in a less aggressive manner.
That's just the risk of the game.
But you need to consider that groups arents always going to hang around at your node to wait for a caravan to start. People will be 20 minutes away questing or farming. A caravan is only a 10 minute journey, the notification will only be at the departing node and the attackers wouldn't perhaps know what exit you're starting from or where you or going.
You could also run your caravan when other people do, to use them as a decoy, or at night, or during an event, and if an important caravan is coming through the attackers will see how many defenders are signed and know that's where the good loot is.
I got the impression from the two caravan streams that a lot of exact details are still to be ironed out. But like I initially said, risk exists and you should expect to lose your caravan on rare occasions.
Death in caravan PvP still applies your usual combatant death penalty, right? So where's the problem? That's like saying that there's no risk attacking another ship in the open seas. The risk is dying. The reward is getting some of the stuff the victim had (in this case the caravan owner has LOTS of stuff).
Go attack 5 of the servers best pvp guilds caravans per day in alpha 2 and see what happens then come back and tell me how theres no risk for attackers.
Nope.
Death penalties in objective based PvP (sieges wars, caravans) mostly dont apply. The only penalty we know to still apply is gear degradation.
If you are one of those top 5 PvP guilds, there is no risk.
Or are you suggesting caravans are only for the best PvP guilds on each server?
As said before, it's actually very balanced from a risk-reward perspective. The only purpose in adding more artificial risk for attackers or giving a fail-safe for defenders is that you lessen the risk that a defender has to take. If defenders get a fail-safe, you directly make it less risky to run caravans while keeping the reward the same, which is completely against the risk-reward concept of Ashes of Creation. If you add more risk for attackers artificially, then there will be fewer attackers, which directly makes it less risky to run caravans while keeping the reward the same, which again is completely against the risk vs reward concept. The way it is now is both sides take a pretty big risk, but also both can get a pretty big reward, so it's balanced. And if it does really happen to be not balanced for some reason, the alpha will show it.
Also, you don't seem to know PvP players really well. I am one, and my main gameplay loops I'm looking forward to are bounty hunting, castle and node sieges, arenas, and protecting friendly trading and PvE guilds' caravans so they can progress better and see me as a friend, and maybe help me when I need their help as well (for example, gear, beating back corruption in an area, defeating a world boss that attacks our martial node but we are not prepped for PvE like a more PvE-focused guild). And of course, guild wars, during which, yes, I will 100% target caravans of my enemy's guild to hurt their progress and economy.
But I'm really not planning on attacking every caravan left and right so that a month after launch everybody hates me, I'm on every KOS-list in the area, and nobody sells me anything while I try to solo defeat world bosses because nobody wants to help me since I'm the most hated guy around. That's not something that's on my to-do list, simple as that. And while there are definitely some that will do exactly that, be the bad guy, there will be way more that are not, just from my experience with similar game systems.
Just because someone said a thing, doesnt make that thing true.
It is not balanced from a risk vs reward perspective.
Nice post, agree with most of it and to the bolded we're not all in the same boat.
The risk associated with the attackers is quite large and regardless of if you believe it exists, the main driving spoke in the caravan wheel is the return on investment caravans will get.
If Intrepid nails how resources work in the world and the economy has increased demand where there is a lesser supply, then it won't even matter if you're unsuccessful on most of your caravan runs, you can still be incentivized to run them.
If Intrepid fails in this regard where resources are not scarce and easily acquired everywhere, caravans will be a dead system because why send resources for no reward when you can just turn them in at home.
As long as intrepid nails this resource balance, the system will be fun to engage with as is, with no changes to how it functions. We won't know if they did until we get into a2 and the betas though.
Well just because you say something doesnt make it true either cptn obvious. Seems pretty balanced when PPL can explain why its balanced and others cant explain why its not.
I looked into what you are referring to and from what I can tell this clashes with caravans specifically. It doesnt make sense for caravans to not have the normal combatant death penalties. Why? Because people that bring materials with them for these events would be able to freely die without risking said materials. You could quite literally have whole groups running empty caravans just because the caravan protects their deaths from dropping loot on the way to a new node.
This will need to be addressed and i dont think you should use it as an argument before it is.
If you are the top PvP guild and you bully people too much, they will just pay the top 2-3 and 4 guilds to team up and crash your castle and node. Then you're all the way back to being a top 100 PvP guild, and nobody helps you to get strong again since they know how you behave now. That's a lot of risk losing your castle, node, and social status for some gold that a top 1 guild has better ways to generate. This means caravans are for everyone because not even the top guild is safe from facing the wrath of their enemies if they turn into bullies.
sure but that cost is not a burden to anyone but the person who starts the caravan (i say this because they still seem to be creating the caravan system for anyone, solo or not, to engage with because people would be incentivized to be a defender for random caravans). Using that system I could easily see someone taking the fastest, cheapest caravan, put nothing in it, and then bring all of their friends to transport mostly safe materials. Of course people can organize to fund these caravans but is that really a good enough solution to the problem i pointed out?
Also, that caravan is gone as soon as it's destroyed. And then you're back to the basic "enemies gotta go red to get your mats".
I really don't see the issue here. If anything, all I see is a waste of player time, because caravans will attract unwanted pvp attention, which simply wastes your time. If you have some random mats (that can be carried by people in their inventories) - just use a mount and no one can even catch up to you.