Is the family summoning system needed?

After hearing Steven's reasoning for the family summoning system during the Ashes Pathfinder podcast, I've had a bit of time to think about it and I think that no matter what measures you put in place, it will always be open to abuse. With that in mind, I have 2 questions for everyone:

1. Do you think Steven's concern of players with small amounts of time not being able to play with each other due to lack of fast travel is valid (i.e. is the family summoning system needed)?

2. Assuming Steven's concerns are valid, do you think the benefits of the family summoning system outweigh the exploitation that can occur?

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Plateau

mcstackerson

I don't like the idea of family summoning but I understand why they want it.

I just want them to make sure they put restrictions on it so it's only used to get to friends to play with. I'd like restrictions on what you can be summoned with you as well as where you can be summoned to and from.

Bardtic

It is not necessary, I do think it is nice though. Some multitude of the proposed solutions to potential abuse should work well enough to make it a nice feature.

Distance and travel should matter, but some compromises need to be made. We do want to be able to play the game, not spend half your time just running around doing nothing.

I think the family summoning system is a very nice compromise.

WMC51

Yes it is because my wife will be running around doing stupid quest or finding new pets and when I get on wanting to kill stuff I don't want to have to wait for her to find me. Kidding but not really lol.

daxiongmao87

I just had a thought. What if the summons were shared, had a total of 8 charges, and each charge used had a higher cooldown time? Maybe this is too complex, but this thought experiment is fun.

Charge 1: 1 hour
Charge 2: 3 hours
Charge 3: 8 hours
Charge 4: 16 hours
Charge 5: 1 day
Charge 6: 3 days
Charge 7: 1 week
Charge 8: 4 weeks

Of course, these numbers could be tweaked, but these are just examples.

Scenario: If you have 3 friends that are not nearby from your family of 8, you can use 3 charges, the 1 hour, 3 hour, and 8 hour one. They would also reset from the shortest cooldown to longest. So in this case, your 1 hour one would return in 1 hour, even though you used 3 charges. The second one would return in 3 hours, 3rd charge 8 hours.

So basically if you have a group of friends that are usually relatively close, but one, two, or three go pretty far, you can summon them without much of a cooldown penalty. And even so, you regain your first charge every hour anyway.

However, to summon 8, you have two options, summon all 8 at once at the expense of a 4 week cooldown, or take 8 whole hours to summon them individually using the 1 hour charge. I suppose you could also use the first 5 charges at once, and then charge 1 3 more times within 4 hours.

I think the biggest downside to this is how convoluted it is though. lol

Haraxa

Short answers:
1. Do you think Steven's concern of players with small amounts of time not being able to play with each other due to lack of fast travel is valid (i.e. is the family summoning system needed)?

For a player base, that is most likely not represented in such a forum at this stage of development? Yes, definetly. I know a bunch of friends who would never touch a game like "WoW classic" in which distance matters, because their play time is so limited. Especially if you log out somewhere in a world in which distance matters and just want to play with friends with less time for an hour spontanously, you need this.

2. Assuming Steven's concerns are valid, do you think the benefits of the family summoning system outweigh the exploitation that can occur?

I definetly could drag some players to AoC and help them to have fun with game features (like open world dungeons) they would not explore, if they had to

log in
search a group
then travel to the location
looking at the clock and realise that half of the time they have is already over

If I had the chance to teleport them to my location and start with the content after a few minutes, though... this would really help them.

Good night,
Haraxa

DeadlyDave

If it was allowed every 24 hours could it be used for abuse.
Is it that hard to travel across a map and meet up, you are playing in the same house so communication is not a problem.
Why can't you start in the same area if playing together is an issue.

I personally would rather not see it in the game.
There's a science node which offers fast travel, i recommend the families level those up first

Valento92

No. I don't think it will ever outweigh the exploitation that will occur.

Damokles

1. No, not really.
2. People will try to abuse the sh*t out of it.

Balrog21

I don't like the idea as it goes against what they are wanting to achieve with their initial design with the world, but if they put some HEAVY restrictions on it I think a compromise can be reached, and hopefully with alpha and beta testing they can find a happy medium.

Jubilum

Makosi wrote: »

noaani wrote: »

Makosi wrote: »

Still a dork, you summon your friend and go hunt together. If every time you want to play, you have to wait for your friends then might as well not log on and go play something else together. I really hope game devs will ignore this thread and leave the summon a family member in place, albeit with more restrictions.

There is always some gathering, crafting, looking at the market, organizing things in a freehold or even just killing mobs for certs that can be done.

Do all that mundane stuff while you're waiting for your friends, then when they are all ready to go, you go.

As far as I am concerned, that is what friends do.

That's exactly what im saying if every time when you login you need to do something mundane, boring, annoying, then are you really looking forward to login in? On normal working day I don't have that much time to play and if i need to spend some portion of that time for this then will I really want to play AOC. I am sure im not alone in this....

These are exactly the things I log in for daily. This is kind of what an mmo is all about. I spend hours organizing storage, checking market trends, processing ore, manufacturing items, testing gear, testing skill rotations. And once or twice a week I may go raid or participate in some pvp event but that is maybe 10-15% of my game time. I bet I know what you are wanting to do but wont get into it in this thread.

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