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Summoning family members can and will be exploited if it stays the same.
Brute
Member
I just watched the AMA thing. I've watched all the other videos on the internet about ashes and i'm very exited for the game. But regarding to the summoning family members... I am %100 sure that serious guilds will assign every player into families and use this system to navigate around the world and destroy other people. There is no problem in this for me but if the developers design philosophy is to make traveling around the world a slow process they should think about how many ways serious hardcore players can exploit those things. I am a hardcore raider in World of Warcraft and we as a guild push the boundaries to the limits to get what we need as soon as possible. Players gonna always try to find gaps and exploit those. Letting hardcore players do things that contradict the design philosophy will have a trickle down effect down throughout the community that will force other non-hardcore players to do the same things unwillingly to be able to compete with other guilds. These kind of things can transform fun and interesting systems in a game obligatory chores that harm player experience.
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Yeah i'm aware of that but those kind of things create a meta. I actually dont care about teleporting or fast travelling for myself. I'm just saying that family teleport thing is just a little example. I don't know if you play WoW, so there was Legendary items in legion that drop very rarely and had a bad luck protection and when you drop a legendary item getting a second one was a very low chance. What people did? Many people made multiple characters of the same class so they could get the best legendary as soon as possible and others who didn't got left behind massively. In WoW player base this had literally no effect on other players because it is mostly PvE driven. But in a MMORPG like AoC these kind of things can have massive effect on other players experience. There shouldn't be any systems that can be used out of its purpose to gain power you shouldn't have otherwise. If something creates a meta around the game it goes out of being just the 0.1%.
As @Aardvark and @Iversithy said, pretty much every system can be exploited in some way, and trying to stop the top 0.1% of players from doing so is going to be a pointless headache for the devs.
Yeah but you can't just ban people just for using systems out of its intended use. Exploiting might be a heavy word for it, i don't know. Assuming that the family thing has no great depth or other benefits bigger than the teleporting your family members, it will just turn into a dead system for most players and diminishes the value of developers labor.
It's no problem for me too. But i'm somewhat worried about their decisions on the systems. Sadly in todays gaming players will always find the most efficient way to play the game. We don't know most of the things and how they will work but for example if there are gaps like this in most of the systems they create "the best way to play the game" which are called metas. And it kills the player agency and choice because most of the players will always prefer the most efficient way. Lets say a building in a node brings the most resource. Why would you build other buildings? Or assigning people into families and using the teleport to navigate around the world is the best way to use the family system, it effectively turns the systems into just click and forget and if you choose not to you'll be actively handicapping yourself. It removes most of the player choice and also diminishes the value of everything done to make the world feel bigger and harder to navigate. Lets say i'm a hardcore PvP player and i also want to use the family feature to do RP stuff or other things like dungeon runs etc. but my PvP oriented guild will assign my family members so as a guild we can be more mobile around the world. And of course as a PvP player i will do what benefits me in the PvP situations. Or lets say there is this cool building that gives your profession a legendary recipe. But the mayor decided to build the other X building that increases the hunting certificates value because it is the best option for making gold. (I'm just making things up) These things pigeonholes players and cuts the number of content in the game for people who want to be efficient. Again teleportation thing is not an important thing for me but if this is how they develop the game and the systems people will optimize the fun out of the game and the systems that look fascinating now will turn into just check boxes with no meaning.
Let's just see how it pans out in the alphas and betas and the system can be tweaked if needed before we just scrap the whole idea..
It does seem contradictory
The only way you could make it for actual families is to limit it to one (1) opportunity to fast travel per character.
The family ends up in one spot and people can’t use it as fast travel.
The node one made sense as only high level nodes could teleport you while this takes no effort
I don't see this as a huge deal. If the top 1% of players who are hardcore want to assign people their families, then it should be allowed. It doesn't mean the system is inherently broken. It seems like a system for casual players who want to play with their friends more accessibly. From how your argument is created, you can argue any system in this game can be abused with the right coordination. Caravans, node sieges, PvP, etc. can be "exploited" with proper intense coordination.
If the design is intended for the majority, which based on current explanation seems to be, then it should continue until testing tells us otherwise and in fact majority of people are getting trash-canned.
I think you underestimate the number of people who would abuse this. Let's face it, MMO players are dedicated and we will use any loophole we can.
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Silverwood
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I agree.
I can imagine zerg guilds splitting up into groups of 8 and going all over the map. Each group has just one member from a family. When one group finds a target, every member of that group starts a chain reaction of summoning their other 7 family members.
Maybe the cooldown is long and a zerg will only use it once a day, but it still allows them to circumvent the need for travel and it completely negates the logistical effort the defenders may have put in to ensuring the success of their trade run*. It also means, that if it's possible, multiple guilds will do it and the effect on global trade compounds.
Another note is that it seems the family summoning is more of an 'icing on the cake' convenience that isn't really necessary. It also sounds like it gives family groups the advantage to instant travel to generally acquire resources (from dungeons or even mines, herds etc. in the open world). So it looks to put people not doing these activities in a family at a disadvantage. I say just make everyone hoof it to their destinations.
The other question is how it fits into different play styles. Players who make rather dynamic dungeon groups (more often than the family switch cooldown) based on who's available won't really benefit from it; you might be able to summon some people will be always be left waiting for the rest. Others who prefer to reserve family spots for people they want to grant storage access permissions to won't capitalise on it either unless their crafting partners just happen to also be their consistent dungeon-running group.
*EDIT: talking about things like the effort put in to scouting possible enemy locations and assessing safety based on their travel distance to a planned route
Maybe...I still think it needs to be tested. Is the alternative to just scrap the system altogether?
One possible fix to this would be when summoned any and all bluffs are removed. I'd also like to see them make it so that your inventory must be empty to be summoned to keep people from fast traveling from their grind spot to the ah/market to unload all their goods.
At the same time though, remaking families will take days, so establishing new families dependent on the list of players who will be available at that time will be rough. Also, the amount of time it'd take to walk to a given point will also mitigate a "zerg" mentality.
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Silverwood
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Take for example, a PvE group has spent an hour getting together then fighting various levels and areas of mobs in a dungeon only to find a party member has to leave for what ever reason.. Then they must fight for an hour to return to a safe area, pickup a replacement player, then go back deep into the dungon.
A summon system would be so much appreciated.
In L2, I made an number of summoning alts and placed them at key locations all over the map, first to scout if a PvE area was empty, then to summon a group there to play.
And yes, did the same for PvP pre-seige or other planned PvP activities to get the upper hand.
I enjoyed both sides of it then, both when our clan did it, and when it was done to us.
Totally for it here.
It would work out fine if its on a 3 hour cooldown.
Let us wait until they actually showcase the system before we start poking it.
A 3hr cooldown is nothing for global range fast travel
Yeah probably not a problem for raids, but they'd use it for open world PvP to gain the upper hand for sure.
I was just thinking about it being exploited for resources. Guild x spends 5 hours mining a resource vein. This yields a ton of common mats with a nice number of uncommon and rare mats. The common mats get loaded on the caravan while backpack space is reserved for the uncommon and rares, which are all summoned back to safety. Caravan loot tables just took a dive. All speculative of course.
Your family can end up together, yet you can't use it to zip all over the map while raiding or PvPing.