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
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Currently no guild !! (o_o)
This is why it is essentialy to provide enough content that it can not be monopolized. If any attempt to monopolize content is futile then folks will not try and one of the biggest incentives to zerg will be eliminated. This monopolization problem has been the death of every open world game which lacked either the equivilent of EVE high-sec or a map so large the monopolization was physically impossible.
As for WoW, a big part of its problem is that it used a faction binary, such systems are doomed to collapse, like a ball at the top of a hill any purturbation is amplifed. But a Trinity is like a ball in a valley, just as in 1984 any one faction getting dominant will result in the other two teaming up against them. Planetside made good use of this teqnique. Having even more factions can get complex and it's not clear if Ashes psudo-factional gameplay will collapse or not but it's got far more potential then WoW's binary which was doomed right at the point of conception.
The issue is that with more content available you will see more Zergs forming.
If 1 zerg cant monopolize all points, then you will be seeing enough zergs to cover all spots (at at least most that are the best).
Tho i agree that it may help a little, but the solution should be Drastic and destroy zerg groups whatsoever.
If a zerg is growing and no other guilds on the server are preparing to face it by creating their own alliances - those guilds have fucked up their strategy and will lose to the zerg. It's a them problem, rather than a zerg one.
No I'm saying you need enough content that ALL the players trying to monopolize ALL the content litteraly could not phsycially cover it all. That makes monopolization inherently impossible even if you had every concurrently online player trying to do it.
This idea is actually awesome, the entire game is more or less centered around the economy.
If the cost is the same war dec both ways, the large guild can always shrug it off, but if the cost is proportional to size A vs size B it helps to influence the larger guild to be less aggressive and play ball politically with the rest of the server.
Also having economic benefits to winning against large guilds is even more motivation, and emboldens small guilds to stay together instead of disbanding and being absorbed in to the zerg
1. I don't think any guild that is bigger than a single node is going to work very well.
2. There is some evidence that the optimal population of a node is not, "As many as possible"
The games challenge is really set as a team game with the citizens of each node being the teams. It would be bad for the game to turn it just into who has the most players, and it is easy to put a soft cap on node citizenship, and a soft or hard cap on node war participation.
Also note than social organizations may be patrons of a node like religions, thieves guild, traders guilds and so on that function as guilds for players that would rather NPCs run the "Guild".
I think the whole mechanics of Guilds and Nodes and social organizations are going to have a few twists in them that make the game more interesting than just ZERG!!!!!!
This will be the same.
Otherwise,. its such a massive consideration, you would already have had exacting mechanics mentioned in detail and not just passing lip service.
Castle sieges have cap of 250 players. So no, its not about who brings more players. So you bring better players to win
And in the open world its the opposite - you bring more players to win.
Once servers are controlled by a small section of players, it becomes the death knell for any game, if players can bar you progression, your more likely to quit.
Remember these guilds are normal filled with the jobless living off mommy or the state, so they can put in 18 hour days, no regular working person can compete
I play maybe 4 hours an evening at the very most.so every 4 days of me playing = 1 for the jobless, no way you can keep up.
Taking it that I run, a pretty large and mostly successful guild in PvP games, just look at our YouTube channel.
If they don’t gate this, they will have empty servers a lot faster than they want.
Second, putting blocks on streaming won’t work either, as it will effect and piss off every small guild, I often stream my screen, to show people in the guild things, take this away, and I’d not be a happy bunny.
It’s a hard fix, I’m not sure how, besides blocking them from severs not marked as streamer servers.
The problem is not just streamers, but there are a lot of Zerg groups that are not connected to a streamer.
The solution has to come from the gameplay, not from splitting the servers. The solution should make it impossible to have zerg groups in the open world.
So how exactly is it When I literally said this in my post?
If its a matter of concern that big groups can just easily blitz through content/smaller groups, that should only be possible as long as skill/strategy, and coordination is leveraged (ya know...actual gameplay), in which case the larger group wins- hense the social aspect of the game design.
If the concern is that both groups are equally skilled in almost every way but your group size is too small to compete, well, that is still a skill issue. Leverage your social skills to coordinate with other guilds/groups and form alliances to combat other large guilds/alliances for balanced gameplay, as it should be imo.
Smaller groups tend to naturally coordinate better so that can give you a built in way to combat larger groups providing the gameplay is well designed and skill based where numbers don't make things an easy button win.
If you are skilled/coordinated enough to dominate the content then that is part of your risk or "skin in the game", and you should be rewarded for that.
If you want everything to be completely balanced for small groups and solo play, then the game isn't soley focused on that, but there will be content and progression paths that exist to accomodate those players to an extent (hense having arena competitions at various scalings like 1v1, 3v3, etc., or small group pve content like events and such, etc.), but the biggest baddest content is focused on rewarding the biggest baddest groups.
The tax pressure suggestion is a solid mechanic to prevent guild getting to megalomaniacal
These issues will self regulate, either through outside Socioeconomic and environmental forces, or inner behavioral personality dynamics and infighting.
If a massive group slips up or overreaches then the consequences of failure hit harder. more tax/more XP debt/more guild upkeep/more alliance fees/more resources per member etc
If you suggest then that bigger guild will just break up into smaller offsets then this inevitably leads to infighting and transgressions/ego tensions.
Which then form into smaller opposed guilds, which may or may not want to overthrow their previous overlords.
Most of these mega guilds are like full time jobs with macro and micro management...So to say this is done 'with ease' is oversight.
If a server ends up with 1 ultra guild and no other alternative then the server will serve as their private environment and the guild will have to decide weather to keep investing time in their server or move on and diversify...at this point the community will know that the server is (megaguilded) and players will either try and join or avoid it like the plague...
All in all It's up to Intrepid to provide the mechanics and systems to promote healthy guild formation while also making enough server provision to accommodate the booms and busts of human group behavior
There are enough content in the game for big groups, like sieges, wars and ect. The good thing about those contents is that they have cap of players that participate.
And no bringing more player is not "SKILL". What skill is it to spam in discord groups or chat to invite players without knowing anything about them. Just invite 1k Randoms and gg. is this skill?
(you can later change the guild size but you have to remake those alliances within the rules)
and then impose alliance rules for determined different size guilds like:
allow 1 alliance to Big guilds (any size)
allow 2 alliances to Medium guilds (1 Big max)
allow 3 alliances to Small guilds (1 Big max and 1 Medium max)
allow 4 alliances to Tiny guilds (1 Big max and 1 Medium max)
Change the numbers as you like ofc, but with something like this, even though you are a Tiny guild, you could make alliances and have the same numbers as the Big ones (more disorganized because its through much more different guilds)
if you make it: Big - 200 players with 1 medium (2 small) alliances = total 300
medium 100 members with 2 medium (4 small) or 1 big alliances - total 300
small 50 members with Big + small / small + 2 medium (4 small) - total 300
would be agreeable
But then there wont be any point in making BIG guild, because small ones have guild perks. So everyone will be just in small guilds
a big guild allied to other big one would be 1000
if you check discords guild recruitment, theres a ton of huge guilds with 500+ players already, NA and EU, I think you are underestimating how much big guilds dominate in these types of games. Thats why we need to find ways of pushing small guilds to some point, the perks are good but will not be enough against a thousand player guild.
The rules in the above post limits a bit more the alliances the big ones can make, so they do not get huge while giving the small guilds the opoortunity to have the same amount of players in a siege for example through alliances, more disorganized but still the opportunity to have the same numbers.
there will always be BIG guilds in games like these
Yes, because there is supposed to be more to it than that. Its supposed to involve social dynamics of grouping with large amounts of players who may have conflicting interests and wants, as well as the aspects of dealing with intrigue, spying, etc. that may be present in large groups. As well as the idea of coordinating, communicating, and organizational skills that are involved with managing groups that are larger by comparison, as well as the planning aspects of having to deal with long travel times and how to strategiize the tactics revolving around all these factors and discussing them with the group. There is also the economic and political factors of maintaining a larger competitively viable group. Yes not all cases of grouping will involve the same intensity or combination of such factors but it is skill nonetheless compared to groups who dont utilize such aspects, and the higher the numbers advantage the more relevant these aspects become, meaning skill is a part of it (but that has to take into account the other things I mentioned in my last post, regarding the requirement of gameplay skill being neccessary even if you have a numbers advantage).
Also, if there are cases where its that easy then you could just do the same thing so there shouldn't really be a problem in that case either.
Currently in Alpha testing we are seeing guilds concentrate their members citizenship in a single node for mayorship control. This is good but in the future if guilds get big enough to dominate multiple nodes mayorships they are likely to try to do so. Discouringing this would be key.
Patron Guild status could be used as key factor. Allow a Patron guild citizens to pay lower rent and service fees in a node, that will tend to pull members in to the node and discourage attempts to flood members into other nodes to conduct take over attempts. Vertical growth of the guild should be rewarded and horizontal growth discouraged.
A guild having Patron status in multiple nodes should thus be discouraged but not outright banned, perhapse an upgrade perk needs to be spent to allow each additional patron status, thus presenting an oportunity cost.
Allow guilds which are both patrons in the same node to ally more easily so that alliances are more often composed of the guilds that share a node, thus allowing the 'higher allegence' of the node to dominate the system more often. Something like a signing fee in gold which is proportional to the distance between Patron nodes could work, that would make long distance alliances very expensive but an in-node alliance free. Cost would be applied for each guild already in the alliance too.
The reason they take over is because there have never been any substantial factors forcing big guilds to break up.
Ideally, it should be increasingly difficult to maintain a large organization.
Maybe the bigger the guild/organization the worse debuffs they have in pvp.
So the old throw bodies and dominate strategy is now a liability...
It's really not that difficult to suppress mega guilds.
As for alliances just add a financial burden/upkeep...If they want to arrange/plan outside of game then you are allowing for subterfuge and back stabbing to occur...which will also regulate mega guilds...
Well i get that there are a lot of things to organize a group. But if you gonna call this skill - then its skill of the leader + few officers. What about the 99% of the fodder in the group? Where is their skill? Why should some noobies have free wins over skilled players just coz they are in zerg group that invites everyone?
I wont join zerg group coz i dont like neither the idea of being 1 of the 1200, meaning my actions almost dont matter at all. nor do i like such zerg vs zerg fights where all you see is flashing effects everywhere, spamming mass spells and hoping that after 20 seconds your group is not with half members alive, coz then there is no turning the fight around no matter how good you are
If the more organised and "serious" guilds want more interesting gameplay experience, then I suggest you don't rig the game with all those plays we regularly see across multiple games:
* game exploits and mechanics abuse to gain unfair levelling / gear / economic advantage
* often under table non-aggression pacts and alliances
* overt massive alliances, this just leads to disappearance of any real competition, and what I call Pax Banana, where part of the playerbase tired of imbalance leaves and more followed due to boredom.
Blown past falling sands…
You people trying to fight the zerg by just clicking in the game are missing the point. The developers should be able to track the groups responsible for zerg behavior. This is why games like EVE have third-party tools called battle report generators. The solution isn't even new; it's just that fantasy game developers often miss the mark. If you can generate a battle report you can conglomerate people and apply actions