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Ingame rewards for caravan attackers needs to be hashed out.
Nerror
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Let's remove the defenders completely from the discussion here please. Defenders are NPCs for this conversation, and #npclivesdontmatter. They take some risk for a potential greater reward. That works as intended and is fine. So please ignore the defenders completely other than considering them above average AI NPCs.
In a risk vs. reward game system we need to have a tangible measurable risk to get a tangible measurable reward. Can we all agree that that is what is meant by this? We need gold/materials/XP debt/item repair or at least a lot of time on the line if people expect a substantial gold/materials/XP reward.
Social and political risk/dislike between players is something the game is incapable of knowing anything about, and no ingame risk vs. reward system can take it into account in any meaningful way. The social and political aspects are meta-level gameplay loops that are important, but completely self-contained in the risk vs. reward sense.
Otherwise I'd happily stand in a node and insult everyone for hours while the XP, gold and epic gear keeps raining down on me. Whether I insult someone's mother, destroy a node, attack a caravan or war-dec a guild, someone won't like it and the result is the same; they'll try to kill me, my guild, my node, and take my stuff.
Caravan PvP has no buy-in cost for the attackers. In all the other objective-based PvP systems we are going to see an initial buy-in cost most likely. Certainly for node and castle sieges (gold/mats). Probably for declaring guild wars too, and also most likely for declaring node wars. So far caravan PvP stands out as having no buy-in cost. That is not a problem either, but it is something to bear in mind, because normal death penalties don't apply to any of these systems.
So focusing only on the attackers, what tangible rewards should they get for what tangible risk, when it comes to caravans? My take:
Thoughts?
In a risk vs. reward game system we need to have a tangible measurable risk to get a tangible measurable reward. Can we all agree that that is what is meant by this? We need gold/materials/XP debt/item repair or at least a lot of time on the line if people expect a substantial gold/materials/XP reward.
Social and political risk/dislike between players is something the game is incapable of knowing anything about, and no ingame risk vs. reward system can take it into account in any meaningful way. The social and political aspects are meta-level gameplay loops that are important, but completely self-contained in the risk vs. reward sense.
Otherwise I'd happily stand in a node and insult everyone for hours while the XP, gold and epic gear keeps raining down on me. Whether I insult someone's mother, destroy a node, attack a caravan or war-dec a guild, someone won't like it and the result is the same; they'll try to kill me, my guild, my node, and take my stuff.
Caravan PvP has no buy-in cost for the attackers. In all the other objective-based PvP systems we are going to see an initial buy-in cost most likely. Certainly for node and castle sieges (gold/mats). Probably for declaring guild wars too, and also most likely for declaring node wars. So far caravan PvP stands out as having no buy-in cost. That is not a problem either, but it is something to bear in mind, because normal death penalties don't apply to any of these systems.
So focusing only on the attackers, what tangible rewards should they get for what tangible risk, when it comes to caravans? My take:
- If the attackers risk losing highwayman points when failing an attack, I think it's fair if they gain roughly the same amount of points if they succeed. Maybe slightly more. Without a potential loss of highwayman points, they shouldn't get any points just for destroying the caravan.
- To cover item repair costs and a small bonus for their time, I think the black market value of goods from opened crates should cover that aspect. Again, if they succeed.
- For rewards better than covering the basic costs in terms of item repair and highwayman points, the attackers need to spawn their own caravan and bring all the unopened crates to a node. This causes the attackers to become the new defenders/NPCs, and as we know from above: #npclivesdontmatter. But they also get a substantial material/monetary and highwayman point reward should they succeed.
Thoughts?
5
Comments
Doesn't that make risk less meaningful?
No they got nothing from failure. They only get repair costs covered if they succeed, and likewise for highwayman points. Wasn't that written clearly enough?
Edit: I changed to wording a little to hopefully make it less confusing.
Attempts to make the caravan system 'engaging' or 'heavily weighted' without the spying, misdirection, and intentional time-wasting would result in abuse and people who feel the need to run this content for the 'see stat go up' motivation.
I know I'm possibly biased because I consider the entire concept of overall 'Highwayman points' to be ludicrous, but I think I'm managing to keep that out of this...
Other games with similar systems have economic and 'legal' architecture underlying this activity type, and Ashes has claimed/implied that aspect. If bandits generally need to get their own caravan to go the rest of the way, then their risk is that theirs might also be destroyed and lost similarly.
But if the caravan system is meant to provide us with PvP and a progression path, then the rewards are the PvP and progression path. If that wasn't an aspect of the reward structure, it wouldn't ever have 'needed to be added'. People would just rob caravans for economic reasons and that would be enough like in other games.
Why does it need to be hashed out? Because I think it's unclear what Intrepid wants here. They have the highwayman system planned, but we know very little of it. Then we have the monetary gains side of things, but again, we don't much about it other than the obvious one where you can steal the goods, either in full crates or a small amount to be sold on the black market.. And then we have the more social/political aspects of denying others the goods of course, which ties into its own system and into the overall node system.
And yes, the PvP fight just for the sake of the PvP fight is definitely also a worthwhile reward.
This post is just meant to be a discussion starter for the attacker's side of things, so it doesn't get muddied up by the defender side of things also.
Well, I'm moreso asking, what difference does it make currently, if they're very likely to just change it all? We don't actually have any decently strong indication that this system will happen.
We don't know if the Highwayman system is based on a singular social org, or one related to nodes. We don't know what their expectations are for caravan speed on better roads, etc.
The entire concept of caravans is so relatively early in the planning stage, I'd doubt they even have the capacity to hash it out, and even if they did, whenever they finally hire that Senior Economy Designer, that person is still going to 'rehash' it.
Like many other aspects of Ashes, they probably can't finish designing it until Alpha-2, so I'd wonder if there's even anything to hash out. Letting us know that they're willing to have a Highwayman system if necessary, is a good thing, though.
"We'll find a way to reward people, because we want this content to be meaningful."
I don't mean that Intrepid needs to hash it out for us, because that is indeed too early as you say. I want us to give them some things to consider before they decide on the system they want us to test in A2.
Opening crates makes no damn sense, because why in the everliving hell would attackers waste their time "maximizing their profits" when they can just "make profits" out of nothing w/ 0 risk.
You want to properly rob a caravan? Have your own caravan ready to carry all that shit to a node. Hell, make it so that black market can open those crates immediately, but it doesn't influence the node's economy and gives you less money, while the legal way takes those "days" of opening crates and influences the economy fully.
Yeah I think I like that approach.
An additional way to go at it would be to oppose the black market to the legal one: as a node invest in one path it hurts the other. As described so far, the black market seems more or less like a building a mayor's node can open up and spec into. Put the legal market and the black one on the different platters of a scale. If a node develop one, the other becomes more expensive to develop.
It would lead to towns leanings towards either the legal transit of commodities or to a strong black market. In a way, it would make NPCs more in line with what the node players are or want, giving the "chance" of having pirate towns or smugglers/bandits heaven, and "law abiding" ones where highway theft is not rewarded as much.
And then there would be large and rich places were both somehow thrive.
Certainly seems like the easiest way to test a solution.
Similarly, if you make the defenders NPCs, then there is zero risk for the attackers, and it becomes a PvE activity you can do to get materials and money. But looking at it from this point is completely useless to the actual discussion because the defenders are not NPCs; they are players. Humans like you and me, and that's where the risk comes from.
In real life, if others were NPCs, you would just rob a bank because there would be no risk. But it's other humans who invest a lot into making it very risky for you to rob a bank, and that's why you don't. The same goes for the defenders. If everybody were NPCs, you'd wear your golden chains and diamond watches in the Bronx. But it's actual humans, and that's what makes it risky to do that because you know you'll probably get robbed.
The main risk of attacking a caravan is that you make people/guilds/nodes and alliances dislike you. If you overdo it, you become a social outcast, which makes it ten times harder to be successful in every other aspect of the game. This is a risk, and this will go into the decision of which caravan to attack and which caravan not to attack. Also humans adapt. You attack them on route x once and next time you sit there for 3 hours with nobody coming through cuz they adapted and chose a new route.
Just like the actual human inhabitants of an area or node are what make the risk for the defenders. For example, if you're really close allies with your neighboring node and you've got the territory under control, then the risk to run a caravan becomes very small because anyone knows if they attack yours, they're done for and can look for a new node and hope that you let it slide.
Moving your caravan through the territory of a guild that you're at war with, on the other hand, is super risky, and people probably don't want to take that route unless they have to and the potential reward is so high they are willing to take this huge risk for it.
If you artificially make either side NPCs to make a point, then automatically the other side loses every risk because the risk comes from both sides being humans.
Other than that, I think the idea of losing highway points from not succeeding is a good idea, but I'd extend it to the defenders as well. If defenders successfully bring a caravan to its destination, they get some form of "escort points." If the caravan gets stolen, they lose escort points. When attackers successfully destroy a caravan, they get highwaymen points. If the caravan they attack makes it to its destination, they lose highwaymen points.
That way, it would almost be like a ranking system for bandits and protectors, and this would actually help a lot. When you search people/guilds to help you protect your caravan, you can see from their escort points how good they are/what's their success rate instead of "they have played the game for a long time so they maxed out escort points, but I really don't know if they're good at what they're doing." Same with highwaymen; if you want to hire people to attack an opponent's node caravan, you can see how good they actually are at that.
This would also help these guilds that want to focus on protecting or robbing caravans to market themselves. "We are more expensive then the other guilds because we are the highest escort points guild in the area. Sure, you can pay less for another guild, but if you really want your stuff safe, you should go with us."
The highwaymen system is just like gathering systems, religion systems, etc. It provides specialization. If you're a max-level highwayman, you're better at robbing caravans, but you had to invest a lot of time into robbing caravans and thus are not as high level in other gameplay systems that require time like crafting, gathering, religion, improving your abilities, running a castle, exploring starsigns and lore etc. It allows choice, niches, and decisions on what you value in this game and where you want to invest your time into, instead of everybody experiencing the exact same gameplay loop from start to finish like in games like WoW or ESO where the only specialization you can do is just completely ignore the whole game and be a PvP player where you just queue and fight or go to Cyrodiil, which is completely separated from the rest of the game. Systems like the highwaymen system or only mastering 1 or 2 artisan classes instead of all, or the religious system, bounty hunter system, etc., break up and diversify the PvP vs. PvE player thing where PvP is in the arena and PvE does raids and that's it basically. Here, you can be a caravan raider, a religious priest, a woodcutting master, a castle defender, a caravan escort guild specialized on land/rivers or oversea. It allows you to actually be an individual and specialize in what you want to do, but you'll be worse in other areas than people that specialize in those areas.
The point doesn't stand, though, because there is not zero risk for attackers; there's a lot of risk. And maximizing profits is the meta-strategy in every single system where you can maximize profits. That's why people do it in other games, and that's why they will do it here. Opening the crates directly is mainly to deny your opponent's guild, for example, their big profit or to deny your enemy node XP. So, it's important to exist for strategic reasons, but if you want to have a reward that's worth the risk of attacking a caravan, you will need to summon your caravan and deliver the goods, and most importantly, the mats, plus wait the time it takes to open the material chests to gain your reward that's worth the risk. Opening the loot directly is not worth the risk of attacking at all unless you specifically do it to hurt the economy of an enemy guild/node, in which case, making money is not your reason to attack in the first place, and the whole risk this is seen differently because you are already enemies. Also, opening the crates directly without affecting the economy of the node is literally impossible. An influx of materials always affects the economy of a node. It's impossible to make it not affect the economy. The only thing that doesn't have to affect the economy are the commodities.
What is their risk?
You cannot in any way shape or form quantify that risk in a way that makes sense in terms of ingame rewards. For the purpose of determining ingame rewards, it cannot be used at all.
Otherwise there's pretty much 0 risk, especially if you're better at pvp or have more people than the defenders.
If caravans are a frequent occurrence, it might be easier to simply raid them all w/o using your own caravans for their loot. Maximizing profits includes the amount of time and effort a group would need to even gain said profits.
Opening crates and carrying that shit on your mounts would take just a few minutes and have pretty much 0 risks. Waiting for you own caravan (which also means that you invested in having at least one), spending time on bringing that caravan to a node while defending it either from the people you robbed or from any kinds of white knights, or even just other robbers - all of that has waaaaaay more risk and time involved in the process.
I should've been more clear in my statement. I meant "influence the local pricings, the way normal cargo does".
Also, if we're discussing pure money-making side of caravans then commodities is the exact thing I'm talking about, because they're the main means of making money from caravans and they're the ones who'll have their prices influenced by trade-ins of different commodities.
And I checked the stream and "stolen rubies" could be easily unpacked at the legal trader, which is very interesting, cause that means you really don't need to use crates for that shit if you want the full money. Maybe Intrepid moved away from the "stolen mats" feature, which, if anything, makes my point even stronger.
No risk for legal rewards for robbing dudes. Great!
Could even been some kind of PvP point system for getting involved, maybe for all PvP. That you could trade it for something. Gear, cosmetics, titles, mounts, or all of the above.
Same needs to be said for a group that successfully takes out a caravan as well. But I get this is early days and that maybe coming. I would just like to hear IS say that this is in the works. Simply put. People rarely in an MMO keep playing content that does not fairly reward.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Caravans#Highwayman_system
Also, there's the unspoken in the video (but spoken in practical gameplay) stipulation of "this helps the group in one way or another". Those mats you're carrying might be needed to craft stuff for the group that's protecting you. Or the money you get goes to them. Same applies to the attackers.
It's all about social connections and contracts. If no one believes that you'll share the spoils of the caravan with them - you won't have anyone to defend/attack said caravan.
Idea that people will get mats from defenders based on the size fights are going to be, to me doesn't make any sense. You would be running that in your guild / groups to help your crafters that are helping you.
No lifeskillers is gathering mats and just to give it all away that makes 0 sense.
And obviously if the defenders were just paid mercs then they would've already gotten their payment beforehand.
I dont see anyone get "paid" it be expected you are helping your guild and events for people to do.
When you need something crafted you will have your crafters / gathers helping you time to time.
It might not be as transactional as I'm making it out to be, but it ultimately is. It's very rare for people to help someone and ask for nothing in return in the future, especially in the context of a guild/friend group. And if someone's that one dick friend who gets help from everyone, but doesn't help back - I dunno how long they can keep having a guild/group of friends who help them.
Ahh ok wasn't sure if you were matching some comments ive seen feeling like they should automatically get some of the loot from the caravan like its a loot box.
Thank you! Fully agree, 100%. If the system is going to go through with the mass-invite spam to randoms in the local area (which I also disagree with) then you can bet on at least a couple people out of twenty, forty, or however many in a caravan raid to start cracking crates as soon as that stuff hits the ground, and before too long, a frenzy will unfold resulting in hardly anything being left to deliver.
When we talk about the attackers, and we think about how they're all getting invited into a random raid with no plan, leader, or mutual trust, and we somehow expect them to figure out whether to finish the trade run or crack crates, to trust each other to hold to that promise, to figure out whose caravan is the best one to call based on quality and distance, and to all get fairly paid out by the new caravan driver for their time and effort? Give me a break. I bet you that if the system goes through with mass invites or crate cracking, most of these caravan fights are going to be zerg fests resulting in a destroyed caravan most of the time and a frenzy of crates being cracked open ASAP with little to no communication.
Dozens of hours of effort to produce a caravan, twenty minutes or less to completely nuke its in-game value into the ground so that a few randoms can take a quick detour for some peanuts.
Pulling this off successfully should be hard to do and require strategy, trust, and foresight. Not as hard as getting the materials to run your own caravan, but quite difficult. I think it should have every group (including "groups" of 1) to enter as an attacker on their own, and each attacking "company" should also be able to attack each other. There will have to be a total limit on the number of players allowed, but that can be arranged. It would encourage people who want to get in on the "ruining other people's day" part of the system to also make social, monetary, or time-based investments into the system with other players on a regular basis in order to pull off their end of the deal successfully. Having a caravan nearby that needs to be physically driven to the pickup location by another player, or perhaps some land-only handcarts for easier mobility leading up to the fight (rather than a timer on hailing a caravan to spawn right next to you after twiddling your thumbs for five minutes) would also require more planning and greater risk.
I don't follow this reasoning, are you assuming that in this version of real life that you are talking about, that the person is immortal?
'NPCs' in this 'irl' scenario with the capacity to kill you, would kill you.
I totally agree that game theory doesn't work like that, but game theory doesn't work like the currently shown implementation of Ashes, either.
I completely agree. It seems risk free to attack a caravan. People will do it just to grief, unless there is something on the line for them as well.
I'll disagree with this one.
From the perspective of making the system harder, it works, but I don't believe either Intrepid, or most of the playerbase, would want this system to be harder to interact with. The more interesting thing would always be for both sides to have a certain amount of effort lead to a certain amount of rewards.
This is one of those systems where I feel it's been designed incorrectly in terms of incentives from the very bottom, so I don't have a lot to suggest. Detailing 'other games where I know this works' that are incompatible with Ashes, isn't great.
Elite Dangerous handles it in a way that Ashes could, but almost certainly wouldn't. ArcheAge handles it (or used to handle it) in a way more suited to Ashes, but fails due to the underlying economic factors of a Node style game.
Combining the two would probably be enough, but the goal of caravans would change. Or at least, it would lead to a 'friction' between 'Caravans are Economic flows' and 'Caravans are conflict events'.
(In Elite you need to either bring a specialized tool which traders can employ countermeasures against, or be able to knock out the target's cargo hatch without destroying them, in both cases you need to also pick up all the loot and this takes time. In ArcheAge you end up in a situation closer to what you describe, but that's still even below the level of mules basically).
1. Make it possible to use a purchaseable tool to pull items off a caravan regardless of caravan destruction, so that smaller groups of bandits can get something without having to go into full PvP, but players still have a reason to hire defenders but could also just take the loss and run
2. Make the 'magic crowbar' or whatever also cost something, or have to be made, to open the crates, and in both this case and the above, make it so that this item always drops when the person carrying it is killed in PvP (or maybe just when they're flagged as a Caravan attacker)
3. Remove the concept of 'stolen' Glint in the case when someone has the magic crowbar and opens a 'Glint Crate.
4. Make it possible to put at least one crate in inventory, but also make it so that crates are 'magic' and massively and rapidly drain mana when they're in inventory (if you want lore, this is a protective measure, this is why you need the caravan, this is why players don't carry/touch them).
The result of all this SHOULD be that a skilled small group of bandits has an option to make a profit without even necessarily being great at fighting, so that they can assess situations in terms of things other than raw numbers.
Then more people might run caravans, and it would be fine to make caravans faster in general if they are in 'escape mode'. It can also change incentives since trade wars and bandit rivalries can come up more easily without everything being 'just keep fighting on the same road'.
There's more to this but I feel like half of it is just 'me arrogantly assuming I need to fix the rest of your incentives' without even seeing them.
So as for how this relates to the thread. The attackers bring tools that they risk losing in battle, they can't use them until they stop or 'snag' crates. Other bandits might fight them to get those tools. They get a reward proportional to how many tools they take the risk of bringing, OR they leave the tools nearby with someone else and try to escort the crates to that person while basically having 0 mana.
Make 'using the tool' take a bit of time, and the current 'big war over huge payload' remains intact, but the attackers lose all their 'Banditry Tools' if they lose.
Does it prevent the zerg?
Nothing prevents the zerg.
I do like the mana drain idea, but I am not sure about actually carrying crates. Maybe the smallest ones? I kind of prefer the simplicity of at least requiring a mule to carry the small crates, but caravans for the big ones.