Caravan feedback & proposal

Caravans...
I don't want to talk about their bugs. There are plenty of reports/threads for this.
I want to talk about the caravan system itself.

Caravans are used to transport commodities/materials between nodes.
A commodity can be bought with glint and transported to a node far away and sell it for a profit.
A caravan has limited tetris inventory slots.
To increase the inventory slots you need to upgrade your caravan. This is expensive as the only viable way to get actual improvements is Weeping Willow parts. You can buy common willow caravan parts at the carpentry for ~2g and 40s (+/- depends on taxes). Currently Weeping willow is EXTREMELY rare.

TLDR: Just making and launching a caravan is expensive.

After this, you have to drive your caravans for hours. Let's say miraleth -> tropics: ~3hrs.

So the caravaneers must invest gold to upgrade a caravan (basic caravan is not worth doing at all, the returns are nothing for the investment). You must buy commodities, 1 epic + 1 rare is about 1 heroic glint + 2 rare glint if i remember correctly.
Now you have to do an almost 3-hour drive.
While you do your caravan you risk being attacked by other players.

Okay, the attackers. All they have to do is spot a caravan, which is easy. The map is very small for the current density of players. Send a chat message on Discord, grab a party, and go kill the caravan. If the caravan has a defense (which it should have), and they lose against the defenders, all they have to do is ask for reinforcements and continue to attack the caravan. Over and over again until you kill the defenders and kill the caravan.

What we have established:
* The caravan must invest money/resources/time beforehand. And quite a bit of it.
* The caravan must farm for glint to buy commodities.
* They must pay defenders. The pay is bad because the return is not that much. Let's say you pay an 8-man party to defend. Your return from Miraleth -> Tropics is ~17g. Let's assume you pay 30% of your profits to the defenders, that's ~5g to the defenders, that's ~60silver for each defender for an almost an 3-hour walk (if there are no attackers) -> means being a caravan defender does not pay out for the time investment and they have the risk of breaking your gear (yes, repairing gear is very expensive)
* The caravan has a very long, slow, and boring walk.
* If a caravan is lost, you lose all the time you spent riding, the commodities, and the caravan parts.
* Attackers just have to spot a caravan. Ask for reinforcements and attack.
* If the attackers lose, they will ask for more reinforcements, including shouting in chat for randoms to join attacking.
* Attackers can continuously come and attack the caravan without any risk whatsoever. Die? Eh, just 3 silver gear repair, lets go again. And again. And again. Until they get bored of the PVP or they kill the caravan.
* With the points above there is *no* risk for attackers. Only rewards. They don't have to invest anything beforehand. They just do their thing and they might spot a caravan. They attack and hope that they win. If they win, they just *summon* a caravan out of thin air, loot, and go into the first node and bank free money - no matter if you get little money because you killed the caravan just outside of the launch node. Its still free money for no investment/preparation.

---- Edit: An explanation about the gear repair: As a defender you're going to be more involved and "desperate" to defend your caravan, which can lead to more deaths than the attackers, which can lead to defenders losing more durability than attackers, thus increased cost of gear repairing for defenders.

Right now, "PVP" zerg guilds just run around scouting for caravans, make a ping on discord and 10+ attackers show up in a couple of minutes. This is just wrong. Where is the risk vs reward that ashes keeps screaming about? The caravan has everything to lose. The attackers have everything to win.

So, I have an idea that will help make banditry more organized and planned, rather than just "Hey there is a caravan going to Winstead from Miraleth by the river".
To attack a caravan you need a scroll, for each individual player. Just like the guild/node war declarations. Bought with glint, something like 1 heroic glint. Or scrolls that scale depending on the caravan level/parts. Big caravans need a more expensive scroll. Starter caravans need a cheap scroll.
If the attackers wipe, meaning, they lost the fight and they can't be resurrected, they lost the caravan event and they cannot join on this caravan again. This can be achieved by having a timer if you leave the event radius. If you left the event radius and you don't come back in 1-2 minutes, you're out of the event.
If the attackers win, they can't just summon a caravan out of thin air to steal the cargo. They must get one from the nearest node. Or, if summoning will be a thing, then lets have the caravan summoning just in the caravan area around the node, much like launching a caravan out of a node.

These will force attackers to prepare for an attack.
They will need to invest something beforehand of the attack.
They will be forced to choose which caravan they want to attack because right now they just attack any caravan no matter what.
They won't be able to just summon a caravan, steal cargo and go. It will turn them into defenders now.
Now, if the attackers managed to steal the cargo, the defenders should be able to attack the bandits caravan without scrolls. -> This means the defenders of the destroyed caravans can freely attack (no scroll) the caravan that stole their cargo. This is to give a chance to get their stuff back. More PVP basically. The same should work if they just pick up the loot to open with crowbars. If you're a defender and an attacker picked up the cargo into their inventory, they should still be red, so we have the chance to get it back.

There is another thing that I would want to propose, but everybody that I already spoken to about this disagreed hard:
* Limit the number of participants in a caravan event.
The reason is that big zerg guilds will just be able to contest/destroy any caravan no matter what. If a 100-man guild decides to attack a 50-man guild, the result will always be in the favor of the attackers. No matter what.
The limit is on both sides, defenders and attackers.
The limit can be done in a variety of ways:
* Based on the caravan level/parts.
* Based on the scroll used - besides the individual participation scroll, you can have a scroll that "fills" X participation slots for your raid. If you have a full raid, you must buy the scroll that costs like 5 epic glint and only 1 person uses it (ah, right now when you want to attack/defend a caravan, each person needs to get close and click a button...)
* There should still be a limit of how many participants can there be, otherwise the caravans will always be a problem that is solved by bringing n+1 players.
* You might say that its hard to bring a lot of players to do a caravan raid when the map will be big. Probably. But with all the mechanics above where you need to actually prepare for a raid, it won't. Because if you want to raid a caravan you need to actually plan and form a party beforehand and then start looking for caravans. Not the other way around. Besides, this could be removed later when we actually have the full map, which might be years away. So until then, we will have the problem of being too crowded and having scouts from zergs everywhere.

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Comments

Chicago

A good way to fix this would be to reward the defenders glint for a successful defense, I don't really think there is enough gold made to even think about paying defenders for their time, so I think it should be an inbuilt system, it could also reward exp but how levels scale ATM having an army of level 12 defenders is next to useless.

Or even better a chest reward at the end like the guild war chest rewards that has a chance to give upgraded caravan parts or something

I agree with you the system is extremely toxic rn and really only benefits bigger zerg guilds, big guilds get their caravans through uncontested and in turn have the gold to become even stronger whilst average players and small guilds have probably a 10% chance to make the run from Mira to tropics, ( not a route I would take but for this example)

Also building your caravan for more healthy and defense usually has the opposite effect, it makes you a target as you can see how much loot a caravan will have based on its HP and if you don't have a full group with you the attackers will usually have a huge advantage and you will loose your entire caravan

Lucascp92

I liked the idea thaat if the attackers kill the caravan and its defenders, they have to set up their own caravan to transport the goods, becoming a target... with their caravan flagged, of course

Roblight

I think you are on the right path with the first suggestion and for the second with putting player limits probably is a bad idea.

I think the issue you are identifying is that the current system is unbalanced in terms of risk and reward. The caravan starter puts in time, money, goods for the result of big money. The defenders who are probably paid by the starter put in time, no money and no goods to receive some money. The attackers put in minimal time, no money and no goods to receive some money. The time aspect for an attacker is also not really perceived as a real cost to most attackers because this type of pvp is probably what they enjoy so the cost side of the equation is almost nothing and any gain of money is larger than nothing.

This just means there needs to be some form of a cost associated with attacking and/or a stacking penalty that prevents endless waves of zerging down a caravan. Instead of doing some scroll it probably would be easier to remove that preparation barrier stopping random encounters with a caravan to attack and instead make it so that if you die as the attacker the defenders can loot your body. The order of loot is money->glint in bag->bag items->gear drop chance. This is your blood or iron tax for attacking and losing the fight. Caravan level will cause additional deaths to scale the drop amount faster so that the first death is say 5 silver, but a second death could be 25 silver, then 1 gold until the loot order continues. All money would be instantly distributed to participating defenders and looted items goes into a secured container on caravan for distribution later even if attackers win. The whole point would be as an attacker you get 1 basically free attempt and 2-3 attempts before the death cost starts to really hurt you. This would additionally reward the hired defenders as they would see defending high risk caravans as a potential huge payday if attacked and they can defend.

This would also spread out potential profits from doing caravans as not all coming from the trade route itself. This would help prevent a need to make caravan rewards so insanely good to justify likely failure rates seen by most players and also prevent large guilds from getting insane value from a handful of caravan trips that have rewards balanced around a perceived risk that a zerg guild likely doesn't have.

Hell maybe pvpers even run bait caravans designed for combat to try and farm attackers because now they can loot attackers for money, instead of farming mobs just farm players.

Gizban

Caravans biggest problem: BORING AS HELL

You literally play BAIT for zergbois.
But it's worse than that, you play the PREY.

The pay out isn't worth guildies' time, so you're alone. Which means zergbois automatically win.

I'll go farm grems.

Rym

I agree, currently the Caravan system is extremely badly implemented. I don't hope, but expect major overhauls and improvements to be done over the alpha and betas.

I lost aproxximately 30 gold to caravans, nowadays you're almost guaranteed to get attacked. And I attacked and destroyed caravans as well out of spite because others destroyed my caravan randomly as well. It's a never ending cycle that breeds toxic gameplay. Overall, even though I made runs that netted out 4g and 8g, my real profit is around 5g. For the time invested I could've made 20g in pure profit from glint farming.

As a current counter for attackers, you could call for a friend to join in as attacker and crowbar the loot since that's instant and the attackers who actually wanted to summon their own caravan don't get anything. You still lose your caravan, loot and gold but this is a method to spite your attackers and ensure they lose their time with you at least, which isn't more than 10 minutes.

Speaking of time, why is it that a solo dps player can destroy a caravan in 10 minutes, but a caravan needs at least 20-25 minutes to do a single node to node run?

Anyway, I decided to step away from the testing grounds and have fun in other titles while Intrepid sorts out these more serious issues that directly make or break the player experience.

atuday

There is some merit to some of the criticisms OP makes. However the proposed solutions completely fail to meet KISS design methodology. I think if we want to make it a risk reward gameplay loop the solution can be made very simple. You can only attack once. If you die, you get nothing except your XP penalty and the loss of any carried loot. No more attack, die, respawn, come back, keep attacking. You die, you get nothing. Your friends survive, they get loot, they can share loot. Or they can laugh and screw you over like pirates tend to do. Same for defenders. You die, you're out. If there is a large group fighting a smaller group, this allows for tactics of attrition. Defeat in detail. Guerilla tactics. Hit and run.

TLDR: Death needs to be meaningful. So lets give everyone a single life per caravan event.

SmileGurney

Have a like just for highlighting the obvious issues with caravans, nevermind the potential solutions. I totally agree that running a caravan is far more risky and expensive, than attacking it, and that's before even considering any server specific factors, guild politics etc.

Bugs ruined caravans for me, but this seems to be improving atm. Shame as they were decent opportunities for pvp, as long as you weren't zerged by some big players.

I'm personally not a fan of their default speed. I would rather lower the monetary reward, but increase their speed.

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