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Debunking misconceptions on the Ashes of Creation Caravan System - Attackers need some risk.
Goalid
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
This post is inspired and is also in part a response to the post @Liniker made on this topic: https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/58914/debunking-misconceptions-on-the-caravan-system-attackers-dont-need-extra-risk/p1
I appreciate his contribution to this conversation and hope this post moves the conversation forward. I've similarly been thinking about this system for years, so thought I should put my thoughts to keyboard. I would have written this during the caravan showcase 3 months ago, but I was taking a much needed break from AoC content, and am now ready to start deep diving into the game again.
I'm going to hopefully summarize the caravan system briefly, then explain why it's broken within the broader framework of the game.
Personal caravans have become fairly revolved around a resource called glint. You kill a mob and they drop some glint. You can then turn that glint into a vendor in your node for some quick gold, or you can use it to create a caravan to make significantly more gold.
How much more? That's determined primarily by the distance a caravan travels and "demand." "Demand" just means how successful caravans have been in the past week. Did a node receive 0 caravans in the past week? Then you get 20 times the amount of glint from a caravan to that node vs vendoring the glint. Did a node receive 200 caravans in the last week? Then you get 2x the amount of glint you would from vendoring. All of these are just made-up numbers, but they illustrate the point. This system is similar to how ArcheAge's trade pack values worked.
Why might a player's caravan not be successful? Because "bandits" can attack caravans and steal their glint. A portion of glint, let's say 50%, is immediately lost upon bandits successfully destroying the caravan. From there, the bandits will either have to start their own caravan to pick up the dropped loot to get the full value of the remaining glint, or they could choose to simply take the glint directly from the destroyed caravan and sell it at a lower profit on the black market. But then, they don't have to worry about anyone else taking their stolen loot from them.
There has been a lot of talk about how there isn't any balance between Caravan Originators and Bandits. Caravan Originators put in all of the hard work they did grinding mobs for glint, only to risk all of that in order to launch a caravan. Meanwhile, bandits invest nothing. In fact, they don't even suffer normal death penalties if they lose the encounter, an encounter which they have 100% power over initiating or not. Instead, they only risk potentially gaining less loot than the caravan originator, aka they're only risking the reward they may gain.
Other acclaimed risks by community members make me question how many MMO's they've played in the past. "Reputation loss" doesn't seem to be a big risk unless it was a caravan destined for your own node. If someone tells me another player is at the top of the bandit leaderboard, that isn't making me scared to cooperate with them. That's just telling me they're a great player. As for a lack of progress in the bandit progression system, we have yet to see what that looks like.
Many people are worried that this imbalance in risk will cause there to be many more bandits than caravan originators, and hence no caravans to be launched. However, Intrepid and games with similar systems merely have to raise the potential reward of a successful caravan to further incentivize them. Thinking of it in terms of Expected Value:
Expected Caravan Profit = (Gold Received * %Success Rate) - Initial Investment
As long as the Expected Caravan Profit is more than the gold gained from vendoring glint to the local merchant, everyone should try and use a caravan. To do that, all a game server needs to do is raise the amount of Gold Received from a successful caravan, no matter what the other variables in the equation look like.
So, the system is automatically balanced by the server, right? Caravans are incentivized to happen no matter how often they fail. But there are still problems.
There is still an inherent problem in there being no risk to bandits. There doesn't need to be any other consequences demonstrated during the Alpha 2 or other playtests, the fact that the system rewards bandit gameplay with no risk, whereas every other system has major risks involved, is bad in and of itself. If there was a gathering profession that could stay in-node without any risk of losing their mats, that would be poor design as well. Now imagine on top of that gathering profession not having any risk, it also potentially yielded the greatest reward out of all the gathering classes. See where some people's frustration may be coming from?
The current design is simply a lot of free gold for bandits. And what if I don't want to be a bandit? I'm able to do other tasks to gain gold, but it wouldn't be optimal gameplay. The game tells you the optimal way to play without risk, and it's by progressing in the bandit system without having to worry about losing any of your current wealth. If you see a caravan that you aren't directly allied with; attack it.
Also, just because the expected value is balanced to make it still worth running caravans rather than using a vendor, doesn't mean caravans will feel great as a player. Nobody wants to lose 9/10 times, but gain a big reward on the 10th try. I know if I was a new player and ran nine caravans and all nine failed, I'd feel hopeless with the system. People want their income to be more stable.
Lastly, some other games have been mentioned by Liniker as having succeeded with a similar system to Ashes of Creation, but they aren't similar enough. These games were Silkroad Online, ArcheAge, and Ravendawn.
In ArcheAge, there was no regionalized economic system. There was a global auction house. But in Ashes of Creation, taking some inspiration from Star Wars Galaxies and EVE Online, caravans aren't just for caravan's sake. The intention is to gather region-specific resources that have different prices in differing regions, and then make caravans to buy low in one region, transport it, and sell high in another. More importantly, the price difference in two regions represents a need for a certain resource in that region. If material resources are simply being stolen by an oversaturated amount of bandits 80% of the time globally, then that entire system collapses. It's fine if glint, which all players passively accumulate over time, is regularly lost. If forest nodes can't get specialized metal, or mountain nodes can't get specialized wood, then we have a problem.
I haven't played Ravendawn, but it seems to differ from Ashes in the same way ArcheAge does. Tradepacks aren't a way to create trade between localized economies. Not only that, they don't have specific areas you can camp to prevent an enemy node from progressing, which you can do in Ashes of Creation.
Silkroad Online lets you make 6 safe trade routes per day. That isn't the case in Ashes, and any similar system in Ashes I think would betray the risk vs reward aspect.
Solutions: Potential Ways to Create Risk for Bandits
1) A simple way to add risk would be to impose the normal death penalty on bandits if they die. I know, I know, complaints and tears aside, this would be a significant risk to individual bandits in every attack. And remember, bandits always get to decide whether to initiate the attack, so if they ever expect to lose they can simply not attack. I think giving bandits corruption would be way too far, however.
2) The Thieves Guild. If you want to be a bandit, then you need to know someone who is going to take stolen goods. And that costs a membership fee. The Thieves Guild wants their cut up front, whether you succeed or fail in your banditry. The more you fail, the more "heat" you bring to yourself and the goods you steal, and hence a higher membership price.
3) Forfeiture of local node resources to your character. Are you the guy who killed all of those players who were bringing some NPC's node some needed goods? Good for you! What's that, you want to use the crafting bench here? Hmm... no. The market stalls? Hmm... No. This wouldn't be permanent, but it adds a bit of annoyance and immersion to the game. If you're a bandit in a certain node, you're a bandit there. Cause enough havoc for a node and maybe even the local guards will start attacking you!
Last words. It seems to me that many players who love the current caravan design often claim to be big fans of full loot PvP. They also seem to claim others who are concerned with the current caravan design are carebears. But this isn't a hardcore system for a PvP gamer who loves to be on the edge of their seat as they risk all their own items like in Escape from Tarkov. This is a system that provides special protection to bandits while they run around carefree looking for more caravans to destroy at no cost to themselves.
I want PvP. I want drama to start from one node blockading another node and preventing all caravans from coming in or going out. I want node sieges to be declared because of this gameplay. I want people to hate another player so badly they do everything they can to find and destroy every single one of their caravans. Caravan destruction needs to evoke a response from players other than, "well they got you, better luck next week". And that can only happen when people go out of their way to be bandits, even though it may cost them something. Even when it's not optimal for their player progression.
I appreciate his contribution to this conversation and hope this post moves the conversation forward. I've similarly been thinking about this system for years, so thought I should put my thoughts to keyboard. I would have written this during the caravan showcase 3 months ago, but I was taking a much needed break from AoC content, and am now ready to start deep diving into the game again.
I'm going to hopefully summarize the caravan system briefly, then explain why it's broken within the broader framework of the game.
Personal caravans have become fairly revolved around a resource called glint. You kill a mob and they drop some glint. You can then turn that glint into a vendor in your node for some quick gold, or you can use it to create a caravan to make significantly more gold.
How much more? That's determined primarily by the distance a caravan travels and "demand." "Demand" just means how successful caravans have been in the past week. Did a node receive 0 caravans in the past week? Then you get 20 times the amount of glint from a caravan to that node vs vendoring the glint. Did a node receive 200 caravans in the last week? Then you get 2x the amount of glint you would from vendoring. All of these are just made-up numbers, but they illustrate the point. This system is similar to how ArcheAge's trade pack values worked.
Why might a player's caravan not be successful? Because "bandits" can attack caravans and steal their glint. A portion of glint, let's say 50%, is immediately lost upon bandits successfully destroying the caravan. From there, the bandits will either have to start their own caravan to pick up the dropped loot to get the full value of the remaining glint, or they could choose to simply take the glint directly from the destroyed caravan and sell it at a lower profit on the black market. But then, they don't have to worry about anyone else taking their stolen loot from them.
There has been a lot of talk about how there isn't any balance between Caravan Originators and Bandits. Caravan Originators put in all of the hard work they did grinding mobs for glint, only to risk all of that in order to launch a caravan. Meanwhile, bandits invest nothing. In fact, they don't even suffer normal death penalties if they lose the encounter, an encounter which they have 100% power over initiating or not. Instead, they only risk potentially gaining less loot than the caravan originator, aka they're only risking the reward they may gain.
Other acclaimed risks by community members make me question how many MMO's they've played in the past. "Reputation loss" doesn't seem to be a big risk unless it was a caravan destined for your own node. If someone tells me another player is at the top of the bandit leaderboard, that isn't making me scared to cooperate with them. That's just telling me they're a great player. As for a lack of progress in the bandit progression system, we have yet to see what that looks like.
Many people are worried that this imbalance in risk will cause there to be many more bandits than caravan originators, and hence no caravans to be launched. However, Intrepid and games with similar systems merely have to raise the potential reward of a successful caravan to further incentivize them. Thinking of it in terms of Expected Value:
Expected Caravan Profit = (Gold Received * %Success Rate) - Initial Investment
As long as the Expected Caravan Profit is more than the gold gained from vendoring glint to the local merchant, everyone should try and use a caravan. To do that, all a game server needs to do is raise the amount of Gold Received from a successful caravan, no matter what the other variables in the equation look like.
So, the system is automatically balanced by the server, right? Caravans are incentivized to happen no matter how often they fail. But there are still problems.
There is still an inherent problem in there being no risk to bandits. There doesn't need to be any other consequences demonstrated during the Alpha 2 or other playtests, the fact that the system rewards bandit gameplay with no risk, whereas every other system has major risks involved, is bad in and of itself. If there was a gathering profession that could stay in-node without any risk of losing their mats, that would be poor design as well. Now imagine on top of that gathering profession not having any risk, it also potentially yielded the greatest reward out of all the gathering classes. See where some people's frustration may be coming from?
The current design is simply a lot of free gold for bandits. And what if I don't want to be a bandit? I'm able to do other tasks to gain gold, but it wouldn't be optimal gameplay. The game tells you the optimal way to play without risk, and it's by progressing in the bandit system without having to worry about losing any of your current wealth. If you see a caravan that you aren't directly allied with; attack it.
Also, just because the expected value is balanced to make it still worth running caravans rather than using a vendor, doesn't mean caravans will feel great as a player. Nobody wants to lose 9/10 times, but gain a big reward on the 10th try. I know if I was a new player and ran nine caravans and all nine failed, I'd feel hopeless with the system. People want their income to be more stable.
Lastly, some other games have been mentioned by Liniker as having succeeded with a similar system to Ashes of Creation, but they aren't similar enough. These games were Silkroad Online, ArcheAge, and Ravendawn.
In ArcheAge, there was no regionalized economic system. There was a global auction house. But in Ashes of Creation, taking some inspiration from Star Wars Galaxies and EVE Online, caravans aren't just for caravan's sake. The intention is to gather region-specific resources that have different prices in differing regions, and then make caravans to buy low in one region, transport it, and sell high in another. More importantly, the price difference in two regions represents a need for a certain resource in that region. If material resources are simply being stolen by an oversaturated amount of bandits 80% of the time globally, then that entire system collapses. It's fine if glint, which all players passively accumulate over time, is regularly lost. If forest nodes can't get specialized metal, or mountain nodes can't get specialized wood, then we have a problem.
I haven't played Ravendawn, but it seems to differ from Ashes in the same way ArcheAge does. Tradepacks aren't a way to create trade between localized economies. Not only that, they don't have specific areas you can camp to prevent an enemy node from progressing, which you can do in Ashes of Creation.
Silkroad Online lets you make 6 safe trade routes per day. That isn't the case in Ashes, and any similar system in Ashes I think would betray the risk vs reward aspect.
Solutions: Potential Ways to Create Risk for Bandits
1) A simple way to add risk would be to impose the normal death penalty on bandits if they die. I know, I know, complaints and tears aside, this would be a significant risk to individual bandits in every attack. And remember, bandits always get to decide whether to initiate the attack, so if they ever expect to lose they can simply not attack. I think giving bandits corruption would be way too far, however.
2) The Thieves Guild. If you want to be a bandit, then you need to know someone who is going to take stolen goods. And that costs a membership fee. The Thieves Guild wants their cut up front, whether you succeed or fail in your banditry. The more you fail, the more "heat" you bring to yourself and the goods you steal, and hence a higher membership price.
3) Forfeiture of local node resources to your character. Are you the guy who killed all of those players who were bringing some NPC's node some needed goods? Good for you! What's that, you want to use the crafting bench here? Hmm... no. The market stalls? Hmm... No. This wouldn't be permanent, but it adds a bit of annoyance and immersion to the game. If you're a bandit in a certain node, you're a bandit there. Cause enough havoc for a node and maybe even the local guards will start attacking you!
Last words. It seems to me that many players who love the current caravan design often claim to be big fans of full loot PvP. They also seem to claim others who are concerned with the current caravan design are carebears. But this isn't a hardcore system for a PvP gamer who loves to be on the edge of their seat as they risk all their own items like in Escape from Tarkov. This is a system that provides special protection to bandits while they run around carefree looking for more caravans to destroy at no cost to themselves.
I want PvP. I want drama to start from one node blockading another node and preventing all caravans from coming in or going out. I want node sieges to be declared because of this gameplay. I want people to hate another player so badly they do everything they can to find and destroy every single one of their caravans. Caravan destruction needs to evoke a response from players other than, "well they got you, better luck next week". And that can only happen when people go out of their way to be bandits, even though it may cost them something. Even when it's not optimal for their player progression.
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Comments
I think the BH system being tied in is fine too, but being caught by a bounty hunter and losing the loot you just stole isn't a risk, it's a lack of a reward. So losing to bounty hunters with stolen goods still has to cause problems for the bandit in other ways to be considered a risk.
If having stolen goods on you keeps you Green, but BHs can still kill you for free - that's a full green penalty on death, while you're being hunted. And then if not all those stolen goods get dropped on death - it's even multiple Green deaths.
attackers have it worse than defenders. people are looking only at the immediate materials they can drop as defenders. they arent looking at everything else.
Id also argue ashes could be one of the first mmos where reputation actually might matter (especially regional). This game´s flow of the population is unique to the genre, as you dont hop from quest hub to quest hub, instead most players will remain anchored to a region, where you will encounter the same players constantly. The collaborative nature of nodes will reinforce that.
I think you also miss one central part of argument, that is about the likeness of the occurence and succes rate.
As i see it, intrepid has evaluated that most caravan runs will be rather uneventfull and peacefull, as it will be unlickely to encounter a hostile group at the right time in the right moment, when you can push the caravans through every little path into every direction of the map.
They probably also think that deffenders will have an advantage most of the time, as they come prepared. The attackers will first have to identify the caravan, then assemble the group for the attack and then remain the dominant force throughout their journey back.
Also the deffenders are the group that have it easier to evaluate how much effort is it worth to put in, as they now the reward involved beforehand. I can see attackers in groups often encountering caravans that are hardly worth the effort for such a big group.
So in essence, if you do want a caravan system that is eventful in 10% of the times, additional risk for the attackers might be bad.
But i could also see in the instance of long distance caravan runs (to other continents for example), my arguments become less and less valid, as opportunity costs for attackers will drop, reputation will matter less and the lickelyness and success rate will increase a lot.
and I now not only believe attackers do not need risk, as I'm actually thinking intrepid will likely end up giving even More incentives and less risk to attackers,
in every single iteration of this system, the usual issues are: its just too safe to do them, sometimes to the point people just do not want to waste time attacking and just run tradepacks all day long instead,
so yea, I am quite sure that people bringing up these issues have not played an mmo with a similar system before, and are basing how they think it works on reading about other games they havent played and reading about AoC which they also havent played and creating false assumptions on player behaviour,
I think it makes no sense to assume AoC will be the only game in human history that has a tradepack system that works completely differently from every other iteration,
Fortunately, I know the developers at Intrepid played these MMOs before, they know what they are doing, and Alpha 2 will show it
that's one of azheares bots
Wrong the wrong guild and you will wish you did not do wrong!
The incentive here is to attack weak caravans and leave the strong ones alone unless you have a big enough pack to ensure success such that you don't end up paying the guild a ton of money. This mirrors what bandits should want to do in the first place, while also introducing real consequences for failure and adding another gold sink into the economy. Having just the attempt of the caravan cost something already goes a long way to making this system more in line with "risk versus reward".
Attackers should face penalties on failure beyond "wasting their time", and the defenders should similarly have the values tuned such that the relative unsafety of the caravan is actually worth it. The latter you can solve by tweaking the gold to glint formula; the former you need actual systems like the ones Goalid is proposing.
It can't really be that most attackers belong to the Thieves Guild because the primary motivation to attack a Caravan has less to do with theft and selling stolen commodities and more to do with preventing Node progression and impeding rival Castle defenses.
Test it. That's what Alpha 2 is for.
reality of the situation is most nodes will be well guarded and most people will know if there's any shithead activity before it happens, people who don't like pvp need to stop freaking out
Everyone has opportunity costs for any activity in a MMO. There's also the huge psychic pleasure PvPers gain from doing this kind of content, so to me the time spent searching and destroying caravans shouldn't be considered in my mind; bandits can also simply grind mobs / gather while they wait to spot a caravan, lowering the opportunity cost even further.
The reputation argument goes the opposite way. I'm not going to destroy caravans near my node, I'm going to go to other people's nodes and destroy their caravans. The enemy side can respect that because it's part of the game, nobody but children got mad during New World when a company sieged their town. I didn't hate the East in ArcheAge. And then as for my own nodes, my banditry is seen as a positive, I'm destroying.enemy caravans, hindering their progress. So honestly, the reputation effects of banditry I think are far more likely to be positive than negative.
The defenders know the loot they have to defend, but so do the attackers. Always. Glint is a resource that everyone on the server gains passively just by playing the game. It's not hard to organize attackers throughout the day just with that knowledge. Not only that, there are also countless choke points, people will spy, have alts solely to look for caravans etc. it's like I said, basically risk free gold for attackers. So the attackers will always have comms set up ready to organize and ambush caravans in a heart beat.
A defender signs up for the risk by transporting mats for increased profits, its their choice to do so and thus needs no further system to punish the attacker. Min/maxing is not something for everyone, it is to be achieved.
So the risk for bandits that your enemies progress more? It's true that that's a risk of sorts, but on the complete wrong side of the equation. That makes attackers more incentivized to spend their time finding and destroying enemy caravans.
This is another advocacy for risks for thee, not for me. It's not ok that the bandits have no risk just because the defenders do. It's the same argument as saying gatherers signed up to go out and gather mats, so there's no need for corruption.
Have fun and be ready to cooperate if the political stage on the map changes.
(But I do take the point that attackers can gather while waiting).
Combined with the risk of losing your own caravan while escaping with the goods?
I'm not suggesting it is, I haven't played a game with similar systems.
If everyone's hanging around for caravans I imagine that'd drive up the value of processing & crafting a lot, which would become a stronger incentive to ditch the pirate life.
Open Seas means I won't be engaging in Caravans regardless.
No need to adjust Caravan design for me.
I'll just be out exploring. I won't be attacking or defending anything.
Ignoring all the Risks and ignoring most of the Rewards.
A fun side effect I could envision to this:
Whichever way the caravan system develops, I want to highlight that I strongly support @Apok's take. Goalid, you somewhat reasonably addressed those sorts of counterarguments in your OP, but your attempts at refuting individual arguments fail to address the combined bulk of them:
Yes, "reputation loss" or "opportunity cost" on their own don't pose a realistic risk-versus-reward decision to bandits, but when you consider how many attempted hostile caravan raids might fail, and how every caravan raid you set up might lead to more defenders the next time you show up, the opportunity cost really starts to pile up. You can't explain away all that time investment required for the bandits with "it's fun for them!" PvE and grinding will be more fun than being bandits for some players too, and yet there will always be some low-risk PvE you can engage in for a guaranteed reward.
If you think PvP is the most mentally stimulating/rewarding part of the game, you should probably not be advocating against its profitability, and instead just reconsider not wanting to be a bandit - or at least become a cheap mercenary and show those bandits just how much fun it is for you to thwart their plans.
Also, can everyone slow down on the self-referential meta humour and inside jokes just a notch; these threads are becoming completely incoherent to any readers who aren't personally involved with everyone else on the forums.
I would be interested in seeing where you got your data here - because there seems to be a bias.
If everyone you asked is part of a large guild, or plays largely at off peak times (Brazilian players are the epitome of both of these), then these players likely would see no risk.
As soon as you lose those two factors, the result is the exact opposite.
I live in Europe, most of my MMO experience comes from EU servers, and some NA, my perspective is still the same, I am unaware of a single MMORPG with a similar tradepack system that this particular system failed to work as intended, and I think its ludicrous to assume AoC will be the first MMO to mess this up, especially knowing that starting in a few months, we will have Years of alpha testing before the game launches, so having this discussion once again prior to testing is irrelevant IMO.
You are mistaken, on one end the gathering player has to go out to get those mats, on the other end the caravan running group DOES NOT have to go run that caravan, a very distinct and important characteristic. Additionally the risk for attackers failing to prevent large resource transports is quite high and is part of the endgame loop. As any nodes development will rely on large quantities of mats.
All told the risk for attackers are as follows
- Failure to take the caravan means it was a complete waste of time... time you yourself could have used to transport a caravan or something equivalent
- Assuming caravans are common then guilds who routinely take caravans will become well known.
- Failure to prevent resource transport will mean development of nodes that are likely not yours and thus provide power to those you are likely already at ends with
The risk to an attacker are significant but not as directly linked as they are for a defender, as it stands now I wager the balance for caravans will be delicate, and will likely need to be tuned more towards the attacker not less.
Simply because attacking a caravan will require you to then transport a caravan yourself for 50% the value or take like 20%? of the original mats. Which really just means running your own original caravan will net a more consistent profit... and players are all about min/maxing.