Caravans need a lot of design love and attention

NoxVost

Dear developers,

Right now caravan system is high disbalanced and not fun part of the game.

Running caravans is nearly the only source of decent gold income. Though the caravanner risks with everything, and the attacker has no risks at all. The income of running basic caravan is less than 1g and there is no any reasons/funds to hire defenders. And, from another hand, even single attacker can kill me without any risk at all (what has happened few times).

Moreover, the caravan coachman can be targeted and killed (and while running the caravan, the driver has no access to his abilities and cannot heal himself). So the attacker kills driver with 2 shots, and then has tons of time to destroy the carriage itself.

Needless to say that running caravan, for example Joeva->Winstead, takes ~50 minutes of real time and displays an extremely tedious gameplay. I would rather avoid doing this anymore with current game design, it simply doesn't worth my playtime.

Please, please - attract the designers' attention to caravan gameplay and make it fun to play.

Thank you!

sciffer2014

It also doesn't feel engaging. The system is kind of new, as far as my own MMORPG experience goes, and I feel like caravan gameplay should be included in the tutorial part of Ashes of Creation upon release. That should be how your character reach their starting city. That way player could get a feel for the overall experience so that it makes it easier to interact with the system in the future.

Also, it might be nice to be able to load your caravan and crate as part of your equipment. So far, I've crafted a caravan - got myself a wolf to run it - created crate ... and still I haven't try caravanning because the system doesn't really feel as part of the overall gameplay experience. (Same could also be said for mount (I use my mount but having it inside the inventory feels weird).)

sciffer2014

As of testing, the gameplay of the caravan is ... as you said. It's a long walk - I will definitely try to avoid it as much as possible. And I honestly don't see why I would follow someone who's travelling with a caravan in order to help him defend it.

It doesn't make much sense.

nanfoodle

IMO it's also has no rewards for defending. People should get exp and glint when successfully defend. Should not be on Caravan owner to reward defenders.

Brocknar

Silkroad Online did this quite well by being able to hire mercenaries. Those then would receive a % of money made. In addition, there was a whole mercenary vs. thief system where you can rank up and earn separate XP with custom cosmetics etc.

Something like this could balance out the risk part massively.

odishy

There is a future system where you rank up as a defender or attacker, which will provide incentive.

But I agree that all the incentive is on attacker and unless the defender route is extremely worthwhile everyone will pick attacker.

Zeridius

I agree with alot of these staments the carvan system is rough. I know it will have a lot of work done to it as we test. Something I would like to add to this converstaion is, slowing down the caravan when hit. In my opinion this is a pointless feature. We are already slugging it as it is. Every bird, wolf, etc slows you down more than you are already going.