Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
And what is the risk there?
I would only do this for aoes creating a pseudo friendly fire atmosphere that makes it so that alliances will more than likely spread their zone of influence making them easier to engage with, and requires a much larger amount of coordination to pull off alliance group objectives.
This would actually also encourage the devs to make aoes deadlier and more impactful. meaning smaller groups do not have to worry about alliance members dying in the crossfire, and can focus on doing large area damage to the zerging mega guilds.
For any individual guild member, it is technically the risk of not getting any direct material reward at all, for a longer time.
Ashes does not simply hand out additional meaningful loot simply for participation, so it lowers the chance of any specific person getting something they want.
As long as the overall chance of outsiders/smaller guilds getting something instead of the big guild isn't zero (basically, no true monopolization of content), then the guild members are risking slower growth in a particular aspect of the game.
Small guilds need to use small tactics avoid the zerg, attack their caravans, make raids into their territory strip their resources so they don't grow back for a long time forcing them to spread out thinning their numbers as they get further away from home making their groups more manageable and evening the odds. Good diplomacy will be important so will spying. A tactic i use is to friend every player in an enemy guild and find out when their members mainly play and when almost no one is online attack their infrastructure. You can also use hacks for their comms see who is online and what not if you really looking to get an edge that was huge in EvE. I believe if i remember correctly from worst to best for comms security was discord , ventrilo , teamspeak , mumble for anybody worried about that, I sure would be.
You will never stop big guilds from forming it's human nature to ask intrepid to punish big guilds is unfair and selfish. It is also in people's nature to gang up against someone bigger! In DAoC it was always the two smaller realms vs the big one and it was constantly changing who was the big one. Even New World had big guilds and it quite quickly turned into organized smaller guilds attacking beating them back. I do agree it makes me nervous with 1k guilds but until I get some playtime in and see how some things work i am not going to stress over it.
Currently from the word of people in A2 it takes like 45 minutes to go from one side of the riverland to the other via mount so realistically a zergs effectiveness will somewhat break down the further they go from there home node.
I think you will see zergs exert power probaly 30 minutes trip their node the guild calls home it definetly wont be as world wide as modern MMO with instant travel everywhere. Like you kill somone on the outskirts of their "territory" it will take awhile for them to be able to hunt down that area.
If there is node overcrowding, housing may be excessively expensive, services may have long queues, and consumption of goods may exceed production, or raw material supply. Because it is a PvX game it may not be ALL about the PvP battle, the environment may matter even in PvP.
If you put 1K on a single node, I doubt 500 of them will be doing much in the way of PvE, and even in PvP given that there is player collision, are they going to get anywhere near a fight, it will take about 20minutes to get them all through a doorway!?
The zerg receives rare loot --> the zerg leader arranges an auction for this loot between the zerglings --> the highest bidder gets the loot, and the bid is divided equally among the zerglings.
If the average bet share over the time of participation in an event with rare loot is equal to or greater than the other income of the zergling over the same time, the zergling will be happy to participate in such events. Given the low chance of losing, this can be considered an almost guaranteed profit. I saw this idea implemented in practice (from the opposite side) in L2 in battles for epic jewelry.
I just wanted to share my experience and hear your thoughts on this matter
Good. Good. It seems that you guys are a bunch of glorious OG MMO players. And with all honesty i really do believe that zergs need to be overthrown which dividing them works best. if all 5 leaders want the same thing they will fight over it. so we can have them deal with their own problems while you chip away their borders.
in the otherhand i believe since we're all on the same page on how we see things and want things, it would be nice to gather together and be in one guild. but highly unlikely considering the different servers we'd be in.
as for a solution i thought of regarding zergs and mega guilds. i think limiting guild members should a starting point to dividing them. second, alliances need to have a time limit, a reason for the alliance and a fee. something's gonna cost something. third, giving smaller guilds enough power as a collective to ruin mega guild EVEN if they're in the same faction. you can't rule over the server as zerg or mega guild without expecting consequences to your actions. fourth, GM limited involvement to put ruin to the balance of the world (depending if there's a team of D&D and WH40k Game Masters to help develop some major crisis/event).
Thats something you should put as a REWARD for zerg guilds, not risk.
They will own most farming spots, Best Raid bosses and everything that drops best loot.
The rest of the players outside the zerg guild will have equal equipment with those with worse gear in the zerg guild.
And the top players in the zerg will have Insanely better gear than all other.
There is no right thing when dealing with zergs man. IDK why its so hard to see that ZERG is like a PLAGUE for any mmo.
If you unite against a zerg and you win vs them, then they leave and the server is left empty, dead server. then you have to get merges between servers and ect.
If you dont unite vs the zerg, then the zerg does whatever they want, and make the life of everyone else miserable.
Its always lose when there is zerg in your server no matter what you do
The real issue is that from all the interviews it seems like Steven dont realize how big of a problem this will be for AOC.
fingers crossed that Steven would see this thread and hopefully share his idea regarding this. which could be highly unlikely since anything he says may or may not backfire. meaning silence would also be a reasonable reply. regardless, this thread can end up being an entire guild created to take down zergs lol. would be pretty interesting to see this happen
It becomes a roleplay heavy, drama ridden battlescape. Streamers will have feuds just for the roleplay fun of it, and their guilds will cause peak chaos. As part of an alpha test you couldn't ask for a better test group vs control group comparison.
i agree, they are very useful in testing servers and game load. can be bad after launch
Cap until Proven
I just hope that in A2 there will be zergs, and he will see then that they are problem. Guess before he sees this, he would not act to change anything. And after he see the problem he will have enough time to fix till release
The worst case scenario is for alpha testing to not have any zergs. And 1 of the reasons for this may be that atm guild size is 30 players. If they increase this amount close to release the zergs may form after the launch. which will be a disaster.
EX: In a castle siege there's a sewer complex with a capture the flag objective. Only 40 people per side can be in the sewer at once. If the objective is won by the attacker, there's a significant disadvantage applied to the defenders like less respawns available, guards doing less, siege weapons failing, etc.
Zerg guilds are obnoxious, but losing fights is what causes them to splinter. Make them have the ability to lose and you will see less zergs. As for streamers, just stream snipe them.
The problem with zergs wont be in Castle sieges, because the numbers there are equal on both sides. 250 vs 250 is not a zerg problem.
The problems with zerg come from the open world, World bosses, open world dungeons, farming spots, and ect.
Just seek help.
I don't like this either, but I strongly believe that this is how Ashes is designed/intended to work.
And I consider it at least somewhat a 'lowering of the reward' moreso than a true risk. If content is monopolized then there's definitely no true risk, it's all reward, and this is going to be a challenge for any modern MMO developer to solve, especially with the current mindsets of players on both sides of the equation (i.e. that people who want zergs solved seem to think that simple solutions work, and people who don't want zergs solved or don't consider themselves zergs, valid or not, don't want random nerfs to their effectiveness).
I fully admit that I don't see how you can class this as a reward for 'the zerg' when it's moreso a reward for 'grouping'.
To put it better, I hope...
Achieving content is a reward for grouping. Adding more members to the group is subtracting from that reward, right up to the point where your group is too small to achieve the goal of the content.
In TL for example, if you think you could clear a Peace Version boss with just your guild, your best option is to go to the boss instance with the least amount of other players, right?
"Grouping" increases your chances of clearing the content. Once that chance is 100%, every person you add is reducing the overall reward of each participant unless your guild is 'abusive'.
Yeah, exactly this. It's been designed to have difficult content that requires groups and teamwork. If you're able to hold together a large guild and organise it so that it's successful, then you're going to thrive. That's by design.
its not that simple.
In castle siege there may be couple of days notice before the real fight.
And many players will know about the siege. It will be easy to get 250 players for castle siege.
Well it probably wont be that hard to get 250 players for open world also. but the problem there is not the 250 players, but that a zerg can bring 500, 800, 1200. Its about that there is no cap limit.
In the recent installment of season of discovery for WoW, I was the GM of the largest and one of the absolute top guilds of the EU realms (racing for World First, fighting for #1 on wclogs). I had about 80 ppl under my wing and the only reason I did not expand more, was because there was no reason to do so as I already had enough insane players. If I had even the slightest incentive to expand more, I would have.
I lead the #1 guild/alliance on my server in the "dark crusade" (wh40k mobile game). There was an incentive to grow and while the limit for players was limited, creating sister-alliances was easy.
Again, if peaceful conglomeration in one or more coordinated guilds will bring the players an advantage, that will happen. If you want players to fight, force them, incentivize them.
There should be peace and stability in the microcosm (aka no perma ganking, random PK), but conflict in the macrocosm. Nobody wants to be the underdog and fight the "big guy". That's why all wow pvp servers sooner or later just "shed" one of the factions.