The war on Arioch was a disaster

Ardi

A week ago I, as the mayor of Miraleth, agreed with the Mayor of Windstead that we could have a friendly node war to test out the system and engage in some PVP. Leading up to the weekend, we posted the date and warnings in the discord a few times, so people would be aware and could prepare.

The day of the node war arrives, and we wrongfully assumed that the conditions didn't change since pre alpha 2. You see, during pre alpha 2 the god spike event never worked, and you needed to get 200 kills. Even if everyone hated the event, 200 kills was not too bad and could be done in an hour.

Node wars do not work like this anymore. The god spike event (which gives most of the points for winning the node war) spawns at 5 in the morning on European servers. Besides that, we needed to gain 800 kills to end the war. This has to be the most miserable content we've had to experience since Alpha 1.

The start was fun, the 2 nodes clashes, 1 came out stronger and we had a few skirmishes. Nothing wrong with that. 150 kills later and 1 side is winning by a landslide and no one is having fun. People from Windstead are getting farmed, everyone unregisters as citizens, and we still have 550 kills to go. We are now forced to spawn kill the few people who are still citizen just to end this bloody war. There is no surrender button, there is no way to end it early. We need to farm 800 hundred bloody kills.

At our current estimates, this is going to take roughly 3 days. There is no one to kill, the node is dead, and a bunch of people had to have their days entirely ruined just to end this travesty. PVP is fun and ganking is part of the game, but turning ember shrines into meat factories just to end a war in a reasonable timeframe is not fun for anyone.

All I'm asking for is a way to end a node war prematurely so we don't have to ruin everyone's experience.

zaayr

please show the winning numbers of kills or points or whatever you want to call them in the options for the war before the war is declared last time i died over 100 times just to end the stupid war that took hours and i got 100% xp debt from it.

you need to put in a way to surrender or end the wars early.

Omimace

Coulds not agree more, with prime time event not being primetime and the target score not being connected or representative of the node/realm population, this is ridiculouse. GM's not supporting requests from the community trying to tests systems when the systems clearly go wrong, just disparadges arranged testing here. The servers community is great and really wanting to help gather and support data gathering.

The current situation on the node has vast numbers of people abondoning nodes or logging off, and everyone has had there wind remove d f rom their sails, depreseed and disolutioned. It has been commente d multiple times before that EU support and interaction is devastatingly poor compared to US and not intervening or supporting the server with this is not helping morale. When a system "does not work as intended" on a US server there appears to be swift and responsive action from GM's not the case on EU opr at least not on Arioch.

Either trigger the godspike so we can try and recover some momentum or allow a node to surrender or something or just end the war. This is very disapointing.

The test shows EU nodes are not working as intended, and the community is disparedged from testing due to lack of support when systmems "do not act as intended".

Crowigor

I see two major and quite unpleasant issues in the whole situation (the fact that you crashed again not even raid on raid, I won't mention it, it's a disgrace from A2 that I don't want to remember).

The first issue that needs to be addressed now is prime times.
Here it's not only about the events that for some reason are working on Pacific time again, although they talked about making them server-dependent back in the A1 days. But also the maintenance operations that are carried out during EU prime time. It's especially frustrating on Sundays when people just stop playing or can't log in to play because the maintenance is scheduled during prime time, and then you have to go to work the next day and you just close the game.
I think a company that plans to self-publish almost globally should think about this. And it needs to be thought about now because many people buy the game and want good service. (Yes, I will call it a game, alpha testing - that's PTR).

The second issue is the clown fiesta with node wars.
The fact that the world can only be reached by winning on the battlefield - I don't even know what to call it. In this case, whether for the winners or for those who participated, it's a very sad story. In our situation, it turns out that we just need to eliminate another 500 people from the opponent who has conceded defeat.
This can be done. But it can only be done by resorting to what the developers themselves are trying to avoid. Pure griefing. Placing people at all popular respawn points and just eliminating anyone who's unlucky with citizenship. And neither side wants to do this.
Therefore, at this stage, it would be wise to make an option where both sides agree to end the war. It should also add a scoring system depending on the node's population. If people start renouncing citizenship, that's also a defeat.

And a separate dissatisfaction is expressed by GMs and CMs, who in a real situation simply ignored the request. Yes, this is a test, but here's the result of the test, consider one node dead.

Hogfather

Agreed. The initial clash was fun, but after reaching about 150 kills everyone thought the war was over and disbanded, then it seemed to start back up again. As said before, the kill count was crazy and the only way you could do finish would be hours of killing randoms or spawn camping, which no one wants.

I think the surrender option would be an option, perhaps doing so might mitigate some of the refugee penalties etc. Many dozens gave up citizenship so they could go back to testing the game rather than working about getting killed in the never-ending conflict.

DerToastinator

Booooooooring!

Yeah, killing 800 people is not indicative og A2 popilation.
Pls fix
Boring call was just to fuc with ardi

Niralys

Agreed.

On one side: the GM support in EU feels really lacking as we do not get such a strong support compared to US. Also the timezone: please focus as soon as possible on EU timezone for EU servers' wars; it is absurd that we get pacific timelines that are just impossible to meet.

On the actual war: I would highly recommend the system of black desert online. Even though this other game had huge problems with p2w one thing they did right was the node wars:

SETUP: the node war actually happens within specific borders of the map. each guild has 3 forts to defend (main one, bigger - other 2 ones, smaller)

- Phase 1: prepare the necessary materials for the war. the materials are used to craft cannons, defenses, etc
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- Phase 2 - Scouting: the two guilds send out their scouts to find out where the forts are and what is the composition of the enemy guild. they need to be careful of not getting spotted to not give information to the other guild. The scouts work together to build a map (not in game and not compulsory, is just more efficient and what everybody was doing back then) with all the information collected. Once done they pass the information to the GM and the officers. These ones then will come up with a strategy and they will set up the groups for the war based on the information they had and set up the forts with cannons and defenses acquired in phase 1
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- Phase 3: The actual war starts, the two guilds to win need to destroy the 3 forts. Killing enemies gives individual scores in the leaderboard (1 kill = 1 point to the person that did the kill). Killing is not necessary to win per se but it will happen in order to naturally destroy the forts as people will try to stop you from hitting their forts as well as to give a bit of a "show" to individual players and see who killed the majority of people (imho we could add also assist as we have classes that cover a healer / support role)

I stress the importance of having a specific , delimited area of the map for the war, in the war we had in Arioch most of the time we were going around the map trying to find our opponents. It should be a limited part of the map and the winning condition should not be amount of kills. We are in a mmo, which imho should focus more on being good at controlling a territory, not being good at killing people - at least in a node war.

The current status of Arioch is that we are still - unwillingly at this point - stucked in a war between Miraleth and Winstead, apart from the initial part where the two nodes fighted at some point it became just lame to be forced to grief people to try to end the war. Nobody wants to kill people at spawn in a node war, we actually want to fight and win gloriously and as honorably as possible.

Jacklambe

at around 150kills we had a massive crash, when we got back in it appeared to be over and done with, enemy combatants were no longer red, so we had people drift off, get into grind groups or just log.
about 30mins later it became apparent it was still going however for a lot of us, we could no longer PVP without flagging as the opposing team was no longer red. pretty janky.

however being caught out in the wild by solo Enemy players was quite fun, I got a few kills in of Miraleth players who were out questing.

what wasn't fun was how it degraded to spawn camping, unable to play anymore I logged off with ~20% debt

Joacchim

Hello,

To chime in on the matter, I'd like to give my impressions on the current War system. I've tried to put together the various feedbacks I have, to make it simpler to digest:


1.Un-finishable war

This has already been covered, not much to add. I support the idea that the required amount of points should be based on the lowest of the two node's current population (kill everyone X times and it should suffice without godspike).

2. Disabled mechanisms during the war

a. corruption

As we've all seen, corruption is disabled between citizens of the two towns. While I fully agree that it's necessary, it clearly opens a few drifting behaviors:
- Camping at spawns (no fun for anyone in my book)
- Griefing within the city, further enabled by guards not reacting, and the current situation of the Realm. We had a cleric+Bard camp within winstead, killing anyone trying to live their life . Yes, we're at war, but the currently buggy mechanisms further aggravated negative feelings on it, and as usual, some players take the opportunity to abuse others.

b. XP Debt

Additionally, we've had a clear subjects that made people reticent to participate actively in a loosing war: XP debt. Having such a mechanism that discourages peoples from dying can be a good way to encourage strategy in PvE and PvP alike. The issue here is that we're talking about a WAR, an organized potential slaughterhouse for the weaker of the two sides.
I believe XP Debt should be disabled for Wars (much like corruption), with logical constraints to avoid abuses (ex: disabled only if last hit is made by an enemy citizen player ?)

3. Useless city guards & low leveled citizen handling

The current state of the realm means that we have a few high leveld players, and lots of low leveled ones. While I'm aware this may be not representative of the game in the long term, this reveals the issues for lower-leveled players, who simply become victims.

Add to that the city guards that do not react to enemy players.

This should be, as we are effectively at war, and this would help lower leveled players. We have to take into account that nodes will rely partly on lower leveled players to provide resources and such, While as citizen of the Node, they will inevitably suffer from the war (and I'm OK with this), having a few protection mechanisms to prevent griefing on them (like having guards to prevent enemies sitting in the city) looks like a must to me.

4. Lack of roaming objectives beyond "killing people"

During the early phase of the war, I was roaming with a small group from my guild. while it was fun, the node's current population meant that we encountered few people, which is OK. That being said, having secondary objectives (like the godspike, but smaller, and less impactful in terms of points) would be nice.
I've read discussions and proposals on having the war declaration define clear boundaries for the fight. I do not know if this is preferable, bu maybe defining a few strategic objectives, spawned upon the start of the war, along with the war could provide a focus point for the fights ?


Happy to discuss these feedbacks furthers if need be

discord: @[SMIC]Joacchim

Pelikanen

I believe a basic feature to surrender the war would be a good addition to the war event or at least more objectives to earn points in different so that if you get steamrolled at least it will be over fast.

One objective could for example be to hold a specific area within the opposing town in order to simulate a "takeover" that forces a surrender.

Also the god spike event needs to be adjusted to EU prime time as previously noted.


Additional there is a bug that has already been reported that if the server crashes during the war it will be stop working - although it did reset itself and got back to normal after awhile. All can be seen in the video.

I will link to a recording I took so during the war for more context - chat and voice removed for privacy.
(Timestamps 29:30 crash / 32:51 Node Relationship window showing no active war).
Youtube video

Veeshan

^ in regards to xp dept they should make no depr from dieung in a war however have the loosing sude get 10% xp dept dor loosing to incentivise fighting it out.
As for people dropping citizenship to avoid penalty need a cd on joing back citizen ship and you dontbget a vote on next election leaving mid war

jehgo

I concur with the general sentiment in the thread.

- Primetime being based on Pacific does not make sense for EU servers, our Primetime should be based on UTC+0
- As far as I can tell the godspike never spawned
- Being able to indefinitely camp someone at an emberspring shouldn't be a thing
- There should be some incentive to attack/defend the actual node. Maybe something akin to CTF where opposing citizens can steal something from your node and attempt to transport it back to their node for a chunk of war points
- Also, the point win condition should account for the number of citizens in each node. I think this supports the notion of mitigating zergs that Intrepid are taking with the guild implementation. Not sure how this would work in practice but something that might be good to see.

Highborn

Thellest here, I'm part of the winstead side of the conflict.
Inicially it was pretty fun, a game of cat & mouse trying to find eachother. We had intel that it should be near or even at HH, but we didn't find the other side so started to branch out and find people. I'm pretty sure we were also fed false intel.
When the first clash happened by all accounts we were rolled and smoke, and even loosing i had some fun.

Now the bad:
-Horrendously bad render distance. By the time enemy players rendered they were within most ranged distance, for some people they just suddenly found themselves in the middle of the enemy zerg.
-No mob spawned that we could have farmed for the node war points
-EXP debt. moving into exp debt / loosing resources during an organized (and it this case agreed upon) event just feels real bad. By everything was said in done i've had over 10% exp debt, but i know people who ever VERY deep in.
-Endless war. The war just didn't f..... end. Even the next day. The game said the node war will be at time X +-1h. This was not the case. the war is endless, AND sometimes bugs out, and is just not up, then randomly comes back up. By the tail end of Sunday (CET TIME) there was an unspoken agreement between players that we just don't roll on eachother.

Overall the direction of the game and node conflicts will work out, but this turned from a friendly spart to a mindless ritual for the bloodgood for no good reason. Arioch so far had been a pretty friendly server, Winsted and Miraleth had been on pretty good terms, to the point i know for a fact we help each other out with node buildings.

edit: almost forgot. After the otherside reached the 800point cap, the war STILL DIDN'T end, and it was open season for the others. Part of the reason why we just looked the other way when saw eachother.