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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
guard system sucks
Xeeg
Member, Alpha Two
Does anyone actually like this crap? Like, honestly, how many players are like "wow this whole guard system of PVP prevention is so fun and innovative, I love it!"?
Anyone?
Anyone?
0
Comments
Cause if that's the case and they kill flagged people in nodes - I support and like this change
They wander around town with some kind of aoe/sight range of when people attack each other.
When a node seige is declared we have a 2 day countdown. The players from the enemy node show as red everywhere in the game, able to be tab targetted and attacked. There are many places in town where the guards dont see you, so you can kill people in front of the storage, for example, and not be punished.
Essentially, the enemy team can lock down/the node storage and force players to drop citizenship or stop doing professions, or just go play something else.
Yesterday, I tried to transfer some material out of storage so I could drop citizenship and at least build a caravan so i can continue to play the game, but I got killed with the mats on me as I was transferring.
So, if you are already behind on gear (as I am) there is no way to catch up after the node seige is declared. I feel like I am on an endless hamster wheel of doing inefficient PVE to catch up to the other players in order to PVP with them. So my PVP content is locked out and my catch up PVE mechanic is locked out. Guards didnt really do shit.
At this point I'm considering just taking another break until P3... None of the remaining game loops available to me are that appealing, I just wanted to finally have some fun PVP, but looks like I missed the power curve for that option.
Is it that there are guards or that they aren't working 'properly'?
This sounds like a basic 'harmless noob trap' to me, a learning experience that only affects most characters once, but I'm genuinely asking because I feel like I'm missing something.
By contrast, if someone were to tell you 'well your guild is supposed to gear you up' I'd call bs, but... I can't 'see' what the guards have to do with this.
I'm just saying that the guards arent preventing the actual thing that people have a problem with, which is being able to still access your storage or do professions. They give a false sense of security, by protecting a few areas that aren't important.
And they dont even "protect", they just kill someone when they see them attack another player. So players with 600 MP can still 1 shot people in the node before they get killed, preventing them from doing professions, and as long as they got repair cash they can keep coming back and camping storage. Meanwhile the players of that node are put in a situation where they have to drop citizenship to continue playing the game. But since their node has all their storage, if they drop citizenship they lose access to the materials that they would be using to continue playing the game. So then they are left with very low efficiency PVE options if they want to keep playing, or just take a break from the game.
So I dont even know what these guards are for anyways. They dont protect the players, and just kill people in a few areas of the node when they see an attack. Pretty useless.
And then that issue is compounded by the dumb ttk and by weird guard placement. So yeah, if the issue is "guards aren't doing their god damn jobs" - I totally agree that it should be fixed. This is just yet another weird move by Intrepid, considering that this exact interaction has been the main issue since P1. People have been complaining about dying RIGHT AT THE STORAGE/CRAFTING TABLES for months now, yet the "solution" didn't even address this.
And if there's no guards near storages, I'm fairly sure the attackers can even run away for free, cause at least in one node layout you can jump over the fence somewhere riiight around the storage location.
Generally I assume that MMO Devs fix things the way they 'want it to be' and 'hope/check that the players don't mind it that way'.
(I know you put solution in quotes, I'm just wondering if I missed something that indicated they were even trying to solve the 'death at storage' thing).
If the guards arent there to protect players from pvp then what is the point? And then why even use guards in the first place, when you can just make it a non pvp zone. The whole thing makes no sense to me. I dont know what the guards are for other than to piss people off. I dont see anything good about them.
I'm not saying that I agree with the decision, it's just that I'm always really careful about assuming that Devs are trying to solve the actual 'problem' players are complaining about or having as a 'negative experience' because different devs don't see these as problems.
I understand what you are saying. The thing the players think is a problem is not necessarily something the devs think is a problem...
But i still dont understand what function the devs have planned for the guards. Like what is the purpose of them in the first place?
Well, you could technically still run toward them to get away from attacks if the TTK was better, right?
Or maybe eventually they will implement an Elite Dangerous style Node Reputation, so people with very low Node Reputation wouldn't be able to just walk around town freely to even reach the Storage, at which point they have some purpose.
If Intrepid implemented this change, while explicitly avoiding THE main problem that the change was supposed to address (from players' pov) - I don't fucking know why the change was even implemented.
So yeah, I don't think we've gotten explicit explanation for why they changed it (unless it's buried somewhere deep in the discord), but if it was done not due to one of the main complaints related to the change - it was a weird damn change. If the devs are fine with people dying in nodes - just say so and don't change a thing. If you're not fine with that - explain why you don't address the main point of player feedback. I'm sure there had to be SOME reason for not putting a guard right between (if not on top of) storage and tables, so I'd imagine that "open development" would present that reason to players, so that players can know how to address their testing experience in their future feedback.
It could be that the guards bugged out and werent defending the storage at the time the attack was placed. Regardless, the TTK is so low that they can easily kill people before guards stop them.
Either way, people are still getting killed at the storage. I have to assume that the design intent is for people to get killed at the storage, otherwise they would just make it a PVP free zone.
Maybe it's unfinished, maybe it's intended, maybe it's placation, and maybe they just don't have enough of an internal consensus to say anything about it.
In any case, I'll hope for the 'Node Reputation' thing.
So just in general, guards are meant to help citizens to survive against war enemies. To me, that should include storage/tables locations too. THOUGH NONE OF THIS BS WOULD EVEN BE A THING IF WE DIDN'T CHANGE EVENT DEATH PENALTIES FFS
How do you want event death penalties to change?
Pvp events should be about fun organized pvp. Keeping big penalties there would just remove as much pvp from the game as possible, and the remaining pvp will always be a "who's got more shit they can lose" situation, which always favors the strong and creates a bigger snowball for their power.
Yeah, right now it is just a "camp storage and kill lowbies/randoms at storage with the most decked out toons in the game". Thats the war/preseige. Sucks balls bro.
Not even worth going around and gathering or trying to get ahead, cause we are perma red flagged against the other node everywhere in the game for the whole weekend.
fuck im an idiot. Turns out I had flagged "defender" when the seige was first declared because i didnt know wtf. Thats why i was red. I just turned it off... Thought it was node citizen vs citizen.
Still doesnt help with the guards being dumb.
Patrolling in pairs would be a start...
https://discord.com/channels/256164085366915072/1299155791609069659/1353767916595843164
Over time the system will have adjustments here and there and be fine
I think it is worth having a guard system that lets people go into the enemy city and commando style just yoink some kills in their own place, this is thrilling!
Carebears who play like bots without communicating with their fellow citizens must coordinate their defense as a group or suffer the consequences for playing like a NPC.
OK, I can understand this aspect from the attacker's perspective, if the guards are actually legit AI cool and this is a difficult task. But it's different when the attackers are maxed out 1 shotters and the only punishment for death by guards is the walk back from the emberspring. Contrast that with the noob at the storage, just trying to catch up and get some better gear so they can actually compete in PVP, getting 1 shotted and losing 1/2 the mats they were transferring from/to storage.
The noob at the storage is risking WAY more, just to do a simple/fundamental task for progression in Ashes, while the person "commando styling the guards" doesnt even have to care about the guards because they can 1 shot the guy with mats before they die. Guy with mats loses 1/2 his shit, killer loses nothing. LULZ all the way back to storage. Guy with mats cant transfer or do anything.
Treating this as an issue of "Carebears who play like bots" is completely missing the point. In a game where professions are REQUIRED to catch up to gear score, there is a huge imbalance between the 1 shotter who doesnt care about guards at all and the regular player just doing a fundamental task - interacting with storage.
This current setup only encourages anyone who is weaker than the 1 shotter to drop their node during node wars, or guild during guild wars, etc. Is this really the incentive we want to drive for players? Drop your affiliations because whoever is online and available is unable to defeat the other side?
If you cant even interact with storage, your options in this game are quite limited, especially when you are already behind on gear progression.
I stand by what I said, I fully get the struggle, and I’m saying it’s okay. If you’re weak, you’ve got to play the game, rely on someone stronger, and ask for help. If you end up dying because you’re weak, that’s your fault. Every group has its heavy hitters, they are the ones who step up as heroes, while you’re stuck playing the damsel in distress, just shouting for rescue.
Newbies don’t sway the tide in conflicts, noobs don't matter, they’re just dead weight the strong have to lug around. If the citizens don't work for the group, maybe it’s time to ditch the group. Talk to the locals and to the mayor, see if they’ll step up. If they don’t give a damn, walk away since these people are not worth your time.
Everything that happens to you and how you overcome everything is just content, it is your personal story.
Grpup PvP games simply have that snowball effect built in, it mostly doesn't matter how fair you make it precisely because it's a game.
People start treating them as PvE games with 'annoying mechanics' or they leave. It's probably 'fixable', but Ashes' foundation has no intention of 'fixing' it, which is why I don't think guards are there to do that.
If your issue is with the suppression of the weak by the strong, this isn't a game to be looking at too seriously.
OK, sure, this is one form of logic... Just not sure how many people find this logic appealing when the vast majority are "weaker" than the top 1-shotters. Being locked out of storage impacts the majority of useful game loops, this is not an area where you want people to recklessly dominate "the weak".
Storage should be one of the most secure places in the game because it directly links almost all of the game loops for power enhancement together. A PVP soft lock should be maybe happening to 1% of the population for a couple hours a month. Not every citizen/guildy for every weekend.
Instead, your suggestion is that the players should start a new game loop which is called leaving their node/guild and finding a new one until they end up on the strongest team? Is this really the incentive people want in a game? I would think that people would still like to retain their guild/node and help them grow stronger, not just run away.
I just dont see why storage access has to be involved in this whole thing, when all it is doing is gear gating people from storage due to node/guild affiliation. There can be many other ways/places to have conflict in the game that dont create this dynamic.
Guards arent/havent been helpful for this type of griefing.
Well there are already penty of ways they do that. There is a reason they made the noob area a NON PVP zone. It's the job of the game designer to put limits on player actions to improve the gameplay for the rest of the players.
IMO storage is one of those areas, almost as important as the noob area. Getting PVP soft locked out of storage shouldnt be something that just randomly happens to regular people playing the game.
Yeah, I agree that would be nice, but when have you basically ever seen an MMO developer know how to do the middle ground of these things?
No matter how many players scream at them year over year, they still make the same shit, they still stick to the same concepts. People been studying the reasons why we get this stuff for decades.
Intrepid may sound like a company that is going to finally be free of all the dumb reasons why this seemed to happen, but really all they've done is show us that those decisions don't come from P2W incentives or a lack of care about immersion.
It comes from the top. Someone who wants these games to be this way on purpose (in this case Steven) even when it won't make them more money, won't make more players happy, doesn't simulate the very thing it's trying to be...
At this point I think we as MMO fans need to start looking at the types of people who want the games, moreso than the financial incentives or 'design mistakes'.
They didn't put the protection on Newbie Zones until Asmon got griefed. Come on.