Things i saw in Albion Online, any plans to avoid them?

For those who havent played or heard of it. Albion Online is a Hardcore Full Loot MMORPG, no quests, all player crafted items, territory control GvG content base.

From playing in AO im curious if you have plans for a few eventualities.

1 If one player is able to work the system in some form to become mayor of many city nodes, or simply own too much power would you address it? In AO a network of a few players held ownership of all craftingstations +- a few due to random auction losses that they reclaimed at next auction. they ran a cartel, and used multiple accounts to hide their ownership for a long time, but it turned out 2 players and a few aiding them from their guilds owned most of the world.
Would you step in or augment systems?

2 Suppose 1 guild or 2+ worked together to capture a dominance over the game locking out most other players from participation in large swaths of content at a given are of the world.. Would you step in?

I have heard you state the game is intended to have consequences. I am all for it I loved the Hardcore nature of AO

My Concern is player Behavior. Player Psycology built the great guilds holding Dominion over albion, every time a player could leave the 90% of the game to join the "BEST" they would, thus the other 90% of players lose the best players and have no chance to unseat those who had been playing since beta. The player desire to participate in Content, caused them to lock others out.

If the game is about consequence is there perhaps a global consequence should things become gridlocked, or simply hurt the overall community?

Multiple times in its lifespan the playerbase of AO would shrink due to issues like this stopping the game from happening, players would call fora wipe hype in hopes that developers would essentially start the entire world over fresh so there would be some chance for others to get fresh starts and take away some of the advantages early adopters and the most crafty used to stop large populations from participation.

I have mixed feelings, and really many design choices change directions of how the world events might play out, but under certain circumstances I support a massive shake up to avoid stagnancy and player lockout. In some cases had AO done a wipe.. i would maybe still play it. I would even have supported them if they wiped annually, just so long as their design choices worked well with it... such as 2x xp gain then i would have been perfectly happy starting over a few times for a new chance at different fun.

I muse mostly about if all the town nodes get built, will they really grow or shrink much after that? or would players migrate to the big ones because they are big. create a self fulfilling prophecy of where the cities will always be and the nodes concept simply have been a 1 time event.

If the only towns within reach that have the amenities i need are all high tax rate, or the owners work together to set a tax rate stopping competition how would players stop them?

Sorry for my ramblings, especially if any of this has been discussed elsewhere and i missed it.

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Comments

Noaani

1, you can only run for mayor if you are a citizen of the node, and you can only be a citizen of one node at a time.

2, They are building a form of entropy in to the game to make it harder for players to maintain castles and nodes over long periods.

There is also a cap on guild size, which should be fairly low in comparison to many other games.

There absolutely will be servers that have a group of players with more control than would be ideal, but they have that in mind even now, years before release.

Blappo

also, second time ive heard "servers" so out of curiosity... do we know how many players fits in a server? as population of a world matters... is it 1000 10000 100000? or perhaps varied..

are there types of servers pvp pve RP Sry i could get this info elsewhere on my own im sure... just get excited thinking on it

Noaani

Blappo wrote: »

also, second time ive heard "servers" so out of curiosity... do we know how many players fits in a server? as population of a world matters... is it 1000 10000 100000? or perhaps varied..

are there types of servers pvp pve RP Sry i could get this info elsewhere on my own im sure... just get excited thinking on it

10,000 concurrent users is the goal, last I heard.

There will not be different types of servers, though there will be servers for different regions.

Blappo

i thought i heard 10k also across X servers could be somewhat segmented but u never know could turn out to be 50k

unknownsystemerror

There is no "mega-server" planned and it doesn't fit anything given as to how nodes and population work. Albion online is a totally different experience that was built with the ganker full loot brahs and chinese gold sellers in mind. Leave that thinking there.

Makinoji

Any player can run for mayor or other city official duties but you must be a citizen and can only be a citizen at one node at a time. Switching citizenship has a long cooldown each time and your taxes are higher.

Guilds holding on to castles will incur fees (taxes) and will have to keep up with the surrounding nodes attached to it, it's not just going to sit back and relax and own people.

Not one guild can run a city/metro alone, there will be systems in play to prevent that.
Once a tax rate is placed, there's nothing you can do about it until that mayor's term is over with and it's changed. One thing though is that if that happens people will move on to cheaper hubs, even if it is further away, at least that's what I would do.

Also, servers are separate, not mega servers.

Damokles

Do you really think that 1-3 guilds will be able to controll all or the majority of the nodes?
I already thought about how to combat that tbh:
All other guild just have to leave the nodes to let them delevel them and level them up once more.
Dont forget: the leader for scientific nodes is democratically elected, and you wont be able to controll that with only 1-2 guilds.

Noaani

Damokles wrote: »

Do you really think that 1-3 guilds will be able to controll all or the majority of the nodes?
I already thought about how to combat that tbh:
All other guild just have to leave the nodes to let them delevel them and level them up once more.
Dont forget: the leader for scientific nodes is democratically elected, and you wont be able to controll that with only 1-2 guilds.

I think 2 to 3 guilds will be able to have rudimentary control over a node cluster (metropolis and it's vassal city level nodes), and maybe on a lower population server that same number of people would be able to control a bit more.

When you look at how node leaders are determined, I really can see it happening. If a guild is determined, they will be able to maintain control over three out of four of the node types without much of an issue (and two of those node types only need to have one member of the guild as citizens of that specific node).

My take on it is that if a small number of people have control over a single node cluster, one of two things will happen. Either the population will stay in the node, or the population will leave.

If the population stay, then imo who cares who is running the nodes, the people are happy so they are doing a good job. If people leave though, those players will quickly find themselves mayors in title only - and the nodes will be deleveled in good time, and the players that left those nodes would no doubt build up a metropolis nearby.

The only time this would fail is if those players with all the political power also have a similar advantage in terms of open world PvP. If they are strong enough to be able to prevent players from leaving to go to a nearby node to start leveling that up (which the threat of being hunted would prevent), then that is a bad situation.

However, my real fear in terms of the leadership system in Ashes is if a server manages to have no good leaders on it at all - and that is something that is really possible (just look at how the world in general has very few good leaders right now).

There is no point in running away from one shit leader unless there is a good leader to move to.

Jahlon

1: No. Intrepid will not interfere in the politics. If one person amasses too much power, then the players have a number of different routes to remove that mayor from power.

2: No. The world is 480,000 km² with an additional 100,000 km² of underrealm. It is highly unlikely that 2 guilds (600 players) would be able to control the entire world. Even a full alliance of 4 guilds/1200 players would be unable to control everything, holding mayor ship of all 5 metros and the rule of all 5 castles. Given the very limited fast travel, that alliance just cannot be everywhere at the same time. There will always be places they have to sacrifice0 control over.

If 1200 people working together out of a 10,000 concurrent population (so 12% of the server) managed to do this, well, then they are doing something right.

Noaani

Jahlon wrote: »

Even a full alliance of 4 guilds/1200 players would be unable to control everything, holding mayor ship of all 5 metros and the rule of all 5 castles.

Actually, that many people would be able to quite easily.

Two of the four node types only require one person from the guild to actually be a citizen. If a well organized guild of 1200 committed players has a single player in an economic node and actually want to take control of it, there is very little any one else could do. All the guild needs to do is be sure that one player has enough gold.

Religious nodes are not much better - have one guild member in the node, and have other members of the guild that are citizens of other nodes help that one player out doing what ever the quests/tasks are that determine religious node leadership.

As for military nodes, that guild could quite easily make sure there are a good number of solid PvP'ers in what ever node they want to take over - at least on the specific day of the leadership FFA arena. If that guild has 50 good players in that FFA, there isn't that much others could do once again.

That many players would have trouble if a server has more than one scientific metropolis, but otherwise, yeah, 1,200 players that are dedicated to doing that absolutely would be able to run an entire server.

Castles *may* be a little harder, but more due to the time constraints than anything else - it may well still turn out to be perfectly possible.

Edit; the problem there is finding that many people committed to the same cause. Most guilds of that size either have the bulk of their players as complete casuals (no offense to casuals, but pulling this off needs that many dedicated players), and the rest are guilds that are more than half full of alts of members, and so their actual player count is much lower than their guild size would suggest.

Lalli

Jahlon wrote: »

1: No. Intrepid will not interfere in the politics. If one person amasses too much power, then the players have a number of different routes to remove that mayor from power.

2: No. The world is 480,000 km² with an additional 100,000 km² of underrealm. It is highly unlikely that 2 guilds (600 players) would be able to control the entire world. Even a full alliance of 4 guilds/1200 players would be unable to control everything, holding mayor ship of all 5 metros and the rule of all 5 castles. Given the very limited fast travel, that alliance just cannot be everywhere at the same time. There will always be places they have to sacrifice0 control over.

If 1200 people working together out of a 10,000 concurrent population (so 12% of the server) managed to do this, well, then they are doing something right.

Finally a man of reason! I 100% agree with you Jahlon.

Makinoji

Lalli wrote: »

Jahlon wrote: »

1: No. Intrepid will not interfere in the politics. If one person amasses too much power, then the players have a number of different routes to remove that mayor from power.

2: No. The world is 480,000 km² with an additional 100,000 km² of underrealm. It is highly unlikely that 2 guilds (600 players) would be able to control the entire world. Even a full alliance of 4 guilds/1200 players would be unable to control everything, holding mayor ship of all 5 metros and the rule of all 5 castles. Given the very limited fast travel, that alliance just cannot be everywhere at the same time. There will always be places they have to sacrifice0 control over.

If 1200 people working together out of a 10,000 concurrent population (so 12% of the server) managed to do this, well, then they are doing something right.

Finally a man of reason! I 100% agree with you Jahlon.

This is also not accounting for espionage, mutiny or simple players not giving two sh^& to do anything other than what they want to do.

Nagash

Makinoji wrote: »

Lalli wrote: »

Jahlon wrote: »

1: No. Intrepid will not interfere in the politics. If one person amasses too much power, then the players have a number of different routes to remove that mayor from power.

2: No. The world is 480,000 km² with an additional 100,000 km² of underrealm. It is highly unlikely that 2 guilds (600 players) would be able to control the entire world. Even a full alliance of 4 guilds/1200 players would be unable to control everything, holding mayor ship of all 5 metros and the rule of all 5 castles. Given the very limited fast travel, that alliance just cannot be everywhere at the same time. There will always be places they have to sacrifice0 control over.

If 1200 people working together out of a 10,000 concurrent population (so 12% of the server) managed to do this, well, then they are doing something right.

Finally a man of reason! I 100% agree with you Jahlon.

This is also not accounting for espionage, mutiny or simple players not giving two sh^& to do anything other than what they want to do.

And I'm going to love every moment of the chaos that follows

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