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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
Defender's can't just lose and lose and chug gallons of risk
But for doing that it would be required a system like I mentioned above
Ah, sorry, those two thoughts weren't directly related, just a sequence in my mind.
I consider 'This caravan has X amount of defense fund managed by an ingame system' to be relatively useless for an RMT group, for the reasons you said, it would be too difficult to control.
But it would also be difficult to set up properly every time for the same reason, leading to complaints. I expect that people would probably be allowed to have basic 'contracts' such as 'I will pay you 50k Gold to help me escort this Caravan'. And I don't mean some ingame item. Just 'hey these two people agreed to this, maybe not even ingame'.
At that point, we have a two pronged problem. RMT groups have additional defense for Caravans which, in turn, multiply their money, and a valid ingame reason to give a specific player a large amount of money. The buyer isn't often some rando 'weakling' in the first place, after all. They would probably be capable of actually doing some defending, but the RMT group doesn't have to actually care if they get the caravan through or not.
In fact, for subscription MMOs, RMT is incentivized to put more effort into both the legitimacy and levels of their characters.
"I have a valid reason to give you a large amount of cash, and if this activity for which I appear to be giving you this cash succeeds, I get more cash, as well as being able to reasonably claim that all negotiations about the amount and requirements of your participation, happened outside of game."
If Intrepid intends for players to somehow 'justify' every time they pay someone 'too much' for walking alongside their caravan (success or fail), it will definitely be interesting, though.
Regarding "1. Money/material reward," I've got some experience with this from other games, and in my opinion, it's not the way to go. People need to share the risks to make it work. Paying defenders upfront could lead to them taking the money and just being afk, or worse, just watching the caravan go down. RMT isn't my main concern here, but it does open up that door.
Now, onto the "2. Highwayman system rewards" discussion. As I mentioned before (hopefully you caught that), Intrepid should tally up the repair costs in gold that defenders inflict on attackers and give them a cut. It's basically farming attackers, which would attract PvPers looking to play as mercenaries or bodyguards along dangerous routes. Quieter routes would naturally become less protected, and overly protected routes would also be seen as non optimal spot for such activity.
My idea of paying gold as bounties is organic; your actions are rewarded accordingly. Also, people would migrate between different routes and adjust their line of work. On top of it, this would put a dent in the RMT business since attackers would always end up losing more than defenders will receive. It's crucial that attackers suffer gear damage upon death and defenders should too.
The defenders we are talking about have no goods. They are just defending. So no, very much still open topic. Try to read the OP again
It's not sufficient, and it doesn't address all scenarios. Take travelers and passersby, for instance, they might have zero interest in defending anything at all since it's not their node
Additionally, it's highly probable that all other merchants would root for the attackers, attackers who will bring item scarcity to drive up demand for the other merchants who didnt get robbed and increase their profits
In the eyes of true industrialists and merchants, everybody else is the enemy
ngl I don't want randoms joining my caravan as a defender. Most likely these people are spies, undergeared or underleveled and useless. I won't trust 1 random near my caravans and will rely on defendingcaravans with my guild.
Randoms joining my caravan as a defender will get kicked (if that is possible) unless they are from a known allied guild.
Everyone has their own unique ways of playing the game but mark my words: taking randoms to defend your caravan is like leaving your gym bag unlocked in the gym locker with your wallet inside it.
Cleric
We'll have to wait and see how it works out, but I don't think the caravan driver will have a choice as it currently stands in their plans.
Therefore, I wonder if the caravan running becomes prohibitive due to pvp interference if it will end up inciting individual players to do micro runs themselves because the odds are better.
Town to town compared to node to node seems like a loong time. If we are talking about the amount of mats that makes sense with a caravan i don't see people really doing it. Maybe towards end game if someone has a op mount for very small runs of back and froth with a really good bag. But there would a most likely a strong reason for them doing it like the very rare mats they found for example.
Any player near the Caravan is invited by the game mechanics to Attack, Defend or Ignore.
Your Guild has no say in what the randoms choose to do.
Offering gold might incentivize otherwise apathetic players to help defend (or even help attack) - sure.
But, any random player can freely choose to defend.
I'd say if defenders want guards, make a deal with other players and pay them out of pocket.
If you can't afford to defend the cargo you want to transport (or attack it for that matter), then maybe you shouldn't be transporting it in the first place.
Just work with others. There should be another group with a similar problem, coodinate with them. Transpeot your stuff together for mutual benefit.
... ... you fear to drive into these Roads ... ...
... the Attackers ambushed to greedily - and to often... ...
... ... ... you know what they awoke in the Darkness of the Playerbase ... ... ...
... ... Griefplayers ... ... ... and Corpse-Campers ... ... ...
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Maybe i look after a Guild sometime soon
Overall this is already the case, though, unless they remove the multiplier applied to the Glint->Gold 'conversion'.
Basically we have to assume that whatever economic levers they have attached to Caravan 'time spent' would still work, for any such discussion. (I'm not saying I do, I agree with you)
Therefore in relation to this thread I don't think we can be concerned about inflation. If defenders join for a system based reward and spend some time, the only real requirement is that the World Manager sets their reward to 'some percentage of the contents of the caravan'.
We're already printing money for time spent, and the more defenders (and therefore successful caravan runs), the more we print, but if Intrepid isn't tying the amount to 'X number of players spent X time', the problem is 'Caravans'.
If you mean the gold awarded to the defenders by the caravan driver, then no. That gold comes straight out of the caravan driver's pocket. It's just gold being shuffled around in the game. No new gold supply entering the system, thus it doesn't affect inflation.
The only inflation concerns come from caravans being too profitable overall, including any losses. This is true for both the attacking and the caravan owner side of the equation. But that is a different topic than this
Yeah if all we are talking about is players paying players for help then hell yeah, by all means. I'd like to see a contract board system set up by Intrepid to support it. And tax the hell out of it as a sink.
I may have gotten the wrong impression. The OP seemed to me, to be talking about an in game reward system for participating in caravans. As in the game was paying you extra gold to simply sign up, not the defending party.
Yeah, you're right.
I honestly just wish there was more clarity about how money and gear are leaving the game.
It just feels like far more is being added than taken.
I get that these rewards are much less tangible than looting goods and gold from the caravan (while decreasing your reputation with the Node) but the long term consequences of players favoring raids on caravans will destroy the local economy and send the "peace oriented players" away to somewhere else.
I don't think we know that really? We also have two types of caravans, the personal caravans and the mayoral caravans.
The personal caravans can be spawned at a freehold too, for example, and just be used to transport processed goods from the freehold to the nearby node, and then raw materials bought on the market back from the node to the freehold for processing. I very much doubt node reputation will enter the equation there. But the local economic activity goes up for sure.
Then we have the mayoral caravans, and I can't actually find anywhere that says that node reputation goes up for the defenders. Node-to-node reputation goes up, but I also can't find any information that explains what that really means. My guess is something about the value and/or amount of goods that can be traded between nodes increases over time, or any gold sinks involved in launching mayoral caravans go down.
The Mayoral caravans are where I can see it makes sense for the defenders to get node reputation with the node sending the caravan at least.