Introduction:
I made a post about this earlier, but since I didn't go into detail and put enough effort into organizing everything properly, people assumed that I was "white-knighting" content creators.
First of all, if you believe that, Content Creators are not different from normal players and are unnecessary for a game to be successful, then read the section below this and if that doesn't change your mind, then I don't think there is any point in talking to you anymore and you should leave this post, as you clearly don't know anything.If you are the type of person that thinks that, Content Creators are different from normal players but should be treated similarly and that their presence is valuable for every game in the current era,
then this post is for you.
Before reading this post, I highly recommend reading this first:
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/44956
It explains, in detail, why streamer privilege won't exist to a large extent in AoC. Now that you've cleared the salt from your head and are ready to look at things with an objective point of view, let us begin.
Importance of Content Creators:
I know, i know, doesn't this section show that I'm a white knight? Not so much. You need to understand this clearly before we move on.
Times have changed. The success of most games nowadays is proportional to the amount of content creators for that game. Content creators are responsible for increasing the popularity of a game.
The popularity of AoC, skyrocketed after Lazy Peon's recent video. Streamers like Asmongold, Summit, and Tim brought a large amount of viewers to the game after reacting to Lazy Peon's video and interviewing Steven.
The amount of people that were brought in by these creators has been shown in the straw poll below:
https://strawpoll.com/qjojxcyub
So for those of you who are after facts, there you go. Content Creators are important to all games. Period. For those of you who think that they are exactly like normal players, you're incorrect. The straw poll shows why. Asmongold and Lazy Peon, together, brought a HUGE amount of players into the game. This means that their value is proportional to the number of players that they brought in. So they are NOT normal players. They are worth THOUSANDS of normal players.
(From here on out, I'll be talking about Streamers only, as they play in front of a live audience while other content creators don't.)
If a streamer is unable to enjoy the game, it will portray negatively to their viewers. Therefore, it is in your best interest to ensure that their popularity does not have a severe effect on their in game experience. As streamers are broadcasting to a live-audience, they are VERY often the target of griefing/ghosting. I'm not going to explain those terms here, but I suggest you look it up.
Almost every game right now has ways to prevent the popularity of streamers from affecting their gameplay.
So now that you've understood the impact of content creators, and why its important to ensure that their popularity does not affect their gameplay, lets move to the next section.
Problem:
When streamers like Asmongold move to a server, they bring THOUSANDS of viewers with them.
Now imagine this situation clearly:
Say Asmongold creates a new character on a server. Thousands of his viewers, will also do the same. They will spawn in the same starting area as him, and it will become a mess. Yes, upon dying, you respawn at the nearest respawn location. But here's the thing, because its somewhat near to where you died, the players can just chase you down. So effectively, you will just end up spending your entire time running from other players that want to grief you. This will just create an extremely negative gameplay experience for Asmongold, and it will reflect negatively to his viewerbase.
However, there is a relatively easy fix for this.
Solution: (READ CAREFULLY BEFORE COMMENTING. PLEASE.)
Right now, when a player dies, they resurrect at a random respawn point in the node/ZOI. To fix the problem, simply make it so that a player has AN OPTION upon death to either, resurrect at a nearby respawn location like USUAL, or resurrect at a RANDOM ONE in the world. ITS RANDOM. They don't get to choose, it just respawns them at a random respawn point on the map. So if a streamer is getting spawn camped, they have an option to respawn elsewhere on the world and avoid it. This will completely remove any sort of mass, low-level griefing, as distance matters in this game. It doesn't affect the playerbase whatsoever, but it gives streamers a lot of room to breathe as they won't have to spend their entire time running away from other players.
EDIT: This option should only be available when the family system has a dual cd, which Steven said he was considering. This option should also only appear after being killed in PvP several times in a row, around 2 or 3 times, by non-party and non-guild members.
Another solution would be to limit the random respawn nodes to the nodes in the same continent as you, so that this doesn't cause the world to appear smaller than it actually is.
Also, another change would be to only allow this until a certain level, say lvl10 or 20. After that, this option shouldn't be available anymore.
That is all. I don't expect this change to affect 99% of the players, as most people will not want to resurrect at a random location on the map unless they're getting heavily spawn camped.
