It has already been pointed out that there are many ways to solve the abuse problems. I think overall the system will be fine. Add a daily cooldown or whatever if necessary. But it also makes complete sense to have 8 man specialized families that can summon each other for tactical hits. This won't create a zerg affect, especially with cooldown on it. It will take real coordination.
Don't forget once summoned you have to get back to your town or metro. Leaving it exposed while the entire guild is gone. In a world of the size explained, there is massive potential for griefing, stolen bosses/farming areas, while the core of an area has gone off through a summon.
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StevenSharifModerator, Member, Staff, Avatar of the Phoenix, KickstarterStaff ›
edited July 2020
Remember. One of the strengths of testing + feedback is the ability to iterate. I’ll be watching this system during the alphas and betas and it’s a very easy change if the intended functionality subverts the design philosophy around fast travel ❤️
One way to limit its effectiveness for exploitative behaviour would be to have family summoning apply a temporary debuff to recipients, drastically lowering their effectiveness in PVP and capping their contributions from damage done towards gaining looting rights.
the most obvious potential I can think of is using squads stealthed rogues to summon in each rogue's respective family members to gank/steal bosses. A temporary debuff would at least allow vigilant groups to potentially respond and counter-gank.
That being said, I'm sure my proposed solution would have a bunch of issues with it that I haven't considered, so it's probably not a solution either.
The way I see it a long cooldown could work. It would be used near the beginning of a play session when one of your friends from your in-game family logs in. They TP to join you to start playing together right away. Some people have maybe 1 or 2 hours in a day to play so if you went off to the other side of the world they would spend too long having to get there. I think that's what the system was put in place to solve, so it being more of a one time per game-session kind of thing would make the most sense as I understand the issue.
Would limiting an account to one family and also making each family its own contained entity help off set some of the problems? With those limiting factors you could never TP in more people than whatever the family size is and you couldnt use alts as fast travel points. Could also limit family TP while carrying rare resources / to many resources
I didn't read every reply here to know if this was already stated, but yeah it wouldn't be hard to have some "level 20 warlocks" in every family, akin to WoW Classic.
What I mean by this is each family will have 2-3 strategically positioned dummy characters that exist for the sole purpose of moving designated groups to key points of interest. Simply log all of the dummy alts in that are positioned near the area of contention and begin summoning family members.
It would be a fairly effective way to migrate zergs much more quickly than it seems like the devs would want, and can/will be done even if it requires paying for multiple accounts due to a max family per account restriction.
I am sure they could find a way to cripple this though, and I am willing to bet money they will. One thing I have noticed about Intrepid and Steven specifically, is his passion to balance things in a fun and fair way. This game has some crazy potential.
My idea was to have points of interest in the world where the summons are allowed; say you had to be in a “summoning circle” at predetermined places in the world, and each person can only summon 1 person at a time, and only 1 person before the cooldown begins, and the cast time is 5 minutes.
So you would have to:
1. Control the summoning circle through PvP; if someone wants to stop you, they could
2. Summon in waves (1>2>4>6>8) which each “>” being a 5 minute summon wave
3. Have an a summon off cooldown
Then, only a maximum of 7 waves could be summoned. So a full group of 8 within a summoning circle would go 8 > 16 > 24 > 32 > 40 > 48 > 56 > 64
It would make it take about 35 minutes to have all 64 players in one area, and 56 players would now have their summon on cooldown (the last 8 not having to summon any additional players, as the entire family would be in one place now)
The long cast time would also deter these low level “alt accounts” from summoning. Parking your level 20 alt account in an area for the sole purpose of summoning would leave them vulnerable; if you were a guild known for these large summoning waves, people could easily kill your low-level alt if it attempted a summon. Max level players could simply roll through the area and wipe you out, meaning each “alt account” would also have to be fully progressed, or defended, to get the summons off.
I think my suggestion would really take an axe to any exploitation of this system. It wouldn’t be viable to park low-level alts in these summoning circles anymore.
Example:
8 alt accounts go to summon the guild to a particular area, and let’s say they are familied with their guild members perfectly to allow these chain summons.
They are low level alts, and attempt the 5 minute summon. A beacon of light extends into the air from the summoning circle as the 8 begin to summon, each person summoning 1 other person before the cooldown begins. Players catch wind of this, see the lowbie alts, and kill them before the first summon: gg ez
Let’s say the first wave goes out successfully. 8 > 16. But the first 8 are low level, ineffective in combat. It would now take an additional 5 minutes to summon 8 more players; and the freshly summoned 8 players are now in a 5 minute channeled cast, and still have to be defended, which the primary 8 cannot do.
This would mean for at least 10 minutes, the summoners are extremely vulnerable to attack, and the summoning circle would have to have additional defenders for at least that long.
So the 2nd wave goes out, and now we are at 24.
additional waves would look like 24 > 32 > 40 > 48 > 56 > 64. And it would stop there, because now the entire family is in one spot.
Basically, one person to summon their entire family to a spot would take about 35 minutes. If you had one family member in the spot, it would take the full 7 waves. If you had two family members in the spot, it would go 2 > 4 > 6 > 8, or about 15 minutes with 3 summoning waves.
Make the teleport to a nearby node instead of directly at player's location, limit to once a day
I prefer the idea of having summoners be vulnerable and out in the world, rather than sitting in town and summoning while 100% safe. If you had to stand in a summoning circle point of interest, you would have to already control the circle through PvP to begin your summons in the first place.
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.
Again, just like all the other systems in AoC, it will come down to how its implemented. Remember, the alpha and beta phases are used to test these kinds of systems. So if they find an exploit or something that the community is against as a whole, the devs will change it.
Remember. One of the strengths of testing + feedback is the ability to iterate. I’ll be watching this system during the alphas and betas and it’s a very easy change if the intended functionality subverts the design philosophy around fast travel ❤️
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.
Just simple limit the numbers for Family maybe a Thruple as in 3 being the max so no one group can abuse it. It should be an adventure every time you leave town. Part of that adventure is moving to the location and meeting up with your party members.
put the max use for family, not for player, don't put 8 use if it's a 8 family members, one'll use it anyway(think 3/4'd be nice) and use a reset that restet once at a time and the CD for the next to restet to start at the 1st CD end.
(sorry if it's hard to understand, i'm french and it's hard to explain my toughts about that)
No fast travel is fine until your whole raid has to ride for 90min to get to the metro you want to seige
Most people would plan a siege in advance and sieges have a declaration period, which gives everyone time to prepare and travel.
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LoyhetaMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
edited July 2020
Make the summon thing one summon a day. If they want to chain summon to a dungeon then do it. If someone has to log and the rest keeps playing then that person should have to ride to them to catch up. I think it would be a fair balance.
I think without the summon it might be too much of a deterrent to playing with friends. If it came down to travelling for 20+minutes to meet up with your friend to play together for a couple of hours they might not want to vs using your single summon for the day to summon your friend and play together immediately.
You could also add a relationship meter. Add bonus exp gain to playing with each other and once capped out you can summon them once a day. Make it take a while and have it degrade over time. So if someone stops playing with you they won't be summonable.
No fast travel is fine until your whole raid has to ride for 90min to get to the metro you want to seige
Most people would plan a siege in advance and sieges have a declaration period, which gives everyone time to prepare and travel.
It doesn't matter if you have 2 years to prepare 90min there and 90min back is still 3 hrs of your play time lost due to just traveling to that other level 5 node and back... and then because there are only 250 slots you might not even get to attack...imagine wasting 3 hrs of your time to not even get to be one of the 250 attackers
It doesn't matter if you have 2 years to prepare 90min there and 90min back is still 3 hrs of your play time lost due to just traveling to that other level 5 node and back... and then because there are only 250 slots you might not even get to attack...imagine wasting 3 hrs of your time to not even get to be one of the 250 attackers
If you have time to prepare, then you have time to adjust your game activities so that maybe they take place closer to the siege and you only need to travel for 10 minutes.
If something is drawing your attention elsewhere in the world, 90 mins from the siege location, then that's your choice in determining your priorities. Instant travel shouldn't be offered for players to avoid having to make choices about what they do, when they do it, and where they do it. We could say the same thing about 'having to waste travel time' for every other activity in the game; that's not a good reason to give players an easy out.
Sieges aren't some disconnected minigame/arena that people should port to and from. Their geographic location matters and so should be tied to travel in the world.
Alternative thought - after hearing Steven's thoughts on the Ashes Pathfinder stream (btw thanks for coming on Steven!)
If the objective is to help those players with very limited playtime, then maybe make the cooldown an account-wide timer that recharges when the player is offline.
Players who only play 1-2 hours will have it full recharged when they log in daily. Hardcore players who play all the time will have it recharge after many hours/1-2 days. More importantly, because play times vary, it becomes exponentially more difficult to synchronise the cooldowns among a large group of players so as to exploit it for zerg purposes.
Edit: there'll still be issues like allowing (very casual) people to use summoning to transport their most valuable gatherables on a regular basis and heavily mitigate the risk of land travel.
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MCakeMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
I believe that in order to see the full effect that the family summon feature would have we will need to see it in game and see how it interacts with certain events. With the right counter measures in place, the family summon feature would overall be a positive one. It allows friends to join each other throughout the world without it being tedious to catch up to one another. Based on how big the world seems, traveling could make up a decent chunk of time and people with limited time per day wouldn't want to have to spend 30min riding out to a dungeon to catch up with their group. If done well, the family summons could be a great QoL feature. That being said I do think it is important to voice our concerns for how this may be exploited.
World Bosses
A guild could use the family summon to steal a world boss, but will the game even function like that? Will it be a tag system for world bosses or just whoever participates will get loot? If the case is that it is tag based then there could be a debuff after being summoned for some period of time that would reduce your damage so it would be harder to steal a tag.
Caravans
A small scouting party could summon a zerg to attack a caravan. However, based off of how caravans have been shown off, you have to designate yourself as an attacker to engage the caravan. I think a cool down for being able to flag for a caravan after being summoned could eliminate the pop up zergs that would gank caravans. But, the zerg could simply wait out the cool down while following the caravan. Or it could be that players have a debuff for pvp once summoned and so it would be advantageous for the caravan defenders to attack the zerg once they see it summoned in so they aren't followed until the zerg is at full fighting capacity. Of course taking the initiative could lead to corruption issues. Another idea is making it so that summoning doesn't work within a large radius of a caravan, but this could be used to tell if there is a caravan present to begin with. Maybe there could be a cap to how many people may flag as attackers dependent on the number of people flagged as defenders? However, this could also be exploited where a big zerg would have some people flag as defenders to increase the cap. Overall, I think we will need to see this one implemented in order to know how it will truly be effected by family summon.
Instantly Moving Loot
There's the idea of having alts set up in different cities so you could fast travel with trade goods to skip the risk of a caravan altogether. This could also be seen on a smaller scale, you have a friend out mining who sees gankers coming so they ask you to family summon them to get themselves and all their farm back to town safely. The solution could be to make it so that players can't be summoned with resources on them. The issue is going to be weapons, armor, tools and other items that could be sold but you wouldn't necessarily want to prohibit a player from being summoned without their gear. There would be no reason to have the family summon at that point. Hypothetically, even if alts could only instantly move what they are wearing it could still be an effective way to move high tier items with no risk. I think in this case it would be wise to have a very long cool down on the family summon feature as suggested above by many. It would at least cut down on the effectiveness of moving items in this manner.
Sieges
I think it goes without saying that family summons shouldn't work during sieges or after the siege has been successful. People could go and scout freeholds and then summon their family to attack the freehold during the period after a successful siege.
I'm sure there are more uses of the family summon that could raise concern, but as with all the concerns listed above, it is completely dependent on how the game systems are implemented. 9 times out of 10, it is too soon to tell if it will be an issue or not. All we can do as a community is voice our support and concerns to help make this game as good as it can be.
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DanteMember, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Just make it so that Family Summoning only works on accounts that have the same credit card linked. That way they know its a parent/kid situation, most of the time. Guilds would prob not trust eachother as much with access to their credit card being available.
Just make it so that Family Summoning only works on accounts that have the same credit card linked. That way they know its a parent/kid situation, most of the time. Guilds would prob not trust eachother as much with access to their credit card being available.
The fact party size is 8 and family size is 8 tells me it has nothing to do with real life family but instead so if you always group with the same group you can get together quickly
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WoodchipMember, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Exploits:
Caravans: I’m a guild leader with 200 members. I break up 64 players by class 8 of each Tank, Mage, Rogue etc. I give each member a letter in each class (A-H) I tell each letter member to go out with a group based on the letter they were assigned. “A” goes North, “B” goes NW, “C” goes NE, etc. You just covered 8 points of the compass with an optimal group (all 8 classes) searching for caravans to roll. Group A hits a caravan with 15 defenders, guild leader tells A to summon families and only B-D to accept summons. You now have a 32 on 15 person zerg. Now group E comes across another caravan with 20 defenders 5 mins later, guild leader tells group E to summon all to accept, now you have a 64 member zerg. This is a problem. If you only send out 7 groups, guess what you can pull everyone back. Another problem.
Economy: Well I just grabbed 100 logs in the forest, now I want to go to the desert biome, poof I’m there. Sure it might take me a while to get to the biome that needs trees but it might just be worth the travel time. On an aside if we allow multi-box there can now be an anchor in a major metropolis.
There are more problems but I think these two are enough to start the discussion.
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Alpha SoulMember, Phoenix Initiative, Avatar of the Phoenix, Kickstarter, Alpha One
I heard about the family summon and I too am not a fan. Too easy to exploit in my opinion and become an additional arm for a competitive guild. Also shrinks the world.
The guild meta WILL be 8 man family squads for teleportation advantage. (or whatever it turns out to be).
I imagine it to work something like you have family that consists of one group. So each member can summon each other. By using summoning skill, get 1hour (or some other value) CD for you to do it again.
And remember you can only summon where you stand, so at least one member of family must go to the spot, you do summoning from. And if you want to summon whole "zerg" guild, at least one of each family members must be in that spot, which really means zergs cant move that fast even with this summoning.
So then a question is, if single people could even get in to that spot alone. Maybe everyone going together would be even faster.
I think people are worried here too much. I think its really great idea for convenience (its something similar to WOW lock summoning, though this one is more limiting that you can only summon one person and get CD, where lock in WOW can summon as many as he wants, given there are 2 randoms nearby and he has shards).
It would really make it convenient, where let say half of party is already there and somone else logs on at last moment. So you can just summon them, instead of waiting let say 30min till they get in spot you gonna farm or do whatever.
And if it proves to be easy to exploit, it is always possible to nerf it. But lets not jump to conclusions thats its gonna be bad without seeing it.
I can understand the issue that you are raising, based on what Steven discussed is that he is fully aware that you can summon your family to a certain location to attack someone. It is not what the system was intended for as it was developed for traveling to a dungeon hence why only 8 members can be in a family. But the core issue that they are trying to avoid is a large group of people trying to do some PVP on the sly and 1 person sees them and all the sudden a zerg gets teleported out of thin air to wreck them which isn't possible as you could only summon 7 people, not including yourself. I do however see the issue that 3 people are running around causing havoc and all the sudden that 1 guy turns into 8 within seconds and that is an issue I can agree with. In my personal opinion, I would say that the summoning feature should only be accessible when the player is in a point of interest for example a dungeon entrance, raid entrance, caravan location, or within a node. This would prevent family members from spawning in random areas to immediately deal with threats that they shouldn't have had the time to deal with until much later or not at all.
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Topcatrs88Member, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
The top raiding guilds will mostly like use the family summoning system combined with the advanced buffs you get in freeholds to push their damage to the max. I don't see this as a problem unless the raid fights are so tightly tuned that you need to do this in order to succeed.
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.
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.
Maybe instead of making it so your inventory is empty either
A ) Making it so all item's in your inventory have a cooldown timer keeping them from being transferred, traded, sold, or stored after a family member summoned them.
or
B ) Make it so that picking up items, gathering, etc., puts a timer on the summoning system preventing you from using it until the timer ticks back down to zero. That timer could have a max time that refreshes as you pick up more items, etc, or increases based on the amount of gathered resources in your inventory, or the distance from the nearest node in which the resource was gathered.
Thats what betas and alphas are for bro its fine. Those things are super easy to tweak, just play around with cooldowns and conditions and its fineee.
The only real concern with this system is multiboxing for people to effectively make a portal for 15 bucks. And you can certainly work around that too.
Comments
Don't forget once summoned you have to get back to your town or metro. Leaving it exposed while the entire guild is gone. In a world of the size explained, there is massive potential for griefing, stolen bosses/farming areas, while the core of an area has gone off through a summon.
the most obvious potential I can think of is using squads stealthed rogues to summon in each rogue's respective family members to gank/steal bosses. A temporary debuff would at least allow vigilant groups to potentially respond and counter-gank.
That being said, I'm sure my proposed solution would have a bunch of issues with it that I haven't considered, so it's probably not a solution either.
What I mean by this is each family will have 2-3 strategically positioned dummy characters that exist for the sole purpose of moving designated groups to key points of interest. Simply log all of the dummy alts in that are positioned near the area of contention and begin summoning family members.
It would be a fairly effective way to migrate zergs much more quickly than it seems like the devs would want, and can/will be done even if it requires paying for multiple accounts due to a max family per account restriction.
I am sure they could find a way to cripple this though, and I am willing to bet money they will. One thing I have noticed about Intrepid and Steven specifically, is his passion to balance things in a fun and fair way. This game has some crazy potential.
So you would have to:
1. Control the summoning circle through PvP; if someone wants to stop you, they could
2. Summon in waves (1>2>4>6>8) which each “>” being a 5 minute summon wave
3. Have an a summon off cooldown
Then, only a maximum of 7 waves could be summoned. So a full group of 8 within a summoning circle would go 8 > 16 > 24 > 32 > 40 > 48 > 56 > 64
It would make it take about 35 minutes to have all 64 players in one area, and 56 players would now have their summon on cooldown (the last 8 not having to summon any additional players, as the entire family would be in one place now)
The long cast time would also deter these low level “alt accounts” from summoning. Parking your level 20 alt account in an area for the sole purpose of summoning would leave them vulnerable; if you were a guild known for these large summoning waves, people could easily kill your low-level alt if it attempted a summon. Max level players could simply roll through the area and wipe you out, meaning each “alt account” would also have to be fully progressed, or defended, to get the summons off.
I think my suggestion would really take an axe to any exploitation of this system. It wouldn’t be viable to park low-level alts in these summoning circles anymore.
Example:
8 alt accounts go to summon the guild to a particular area, and let’s say they are familied with their guild members perfectly to allow these chain summons.
They are low level alts, and attempt the 5 minute summon. A beacon of light extends into the air from the summoning circle as the 8 begin to summon, each person summoning 1 other person before the cooldown begins. Players catch wind of this, see the lowbie alts, and kill them before the first summon: gg ez
Let’s say the first wave goes out successfully. 8 > 16. But the first 8 are low level, ineffective in combat. It would now take an additional 5 minutes to summon 8 more players; and the freshly summoned 8 players are now in a 5 minute channeled cast, and still have to be defended, which the primary 8 cannot do.
This would mean for at least 10 minutes, the summoners are extremely vulnerable to attack, and the summoning circle would have to have additional defenders for at least that long.
So the 2nd wave goes out, and now we are at 24.
additional waves would look like 24 > 32 > 40 > 48 > 56 > 64. And it would stop there, because now the entire family is in one spot.
Basically, one person to summon their entire family to a spot would take about 35 minutes. If you had one family member in the spot, it would take the full 7 waves. If you had two family members in the spot, it would go 2 > 4 > 6 > 8, or about 15 minutes with 3 summoning waves.
South East Asia/Oceania server discord: https://discord.gg/J4Epj77
I prefer the idea of having summoners be vulnerable and out in the world, rather than sitting in town and summoning while 100% safe. If you had to stand in a summoning circle point of interest, you would have to already control the circle through PvP to begin your summons in the first place.
Again, just like all the other systems in AoC, it will come down to how its implemented. Remember, the alpha and beta phases are used to test these kinds of systems. So if they find an exploit or something that the community is against as a whole, the devs will change it.
@Nagash
(sorry if it's hard to understand, i'm french and it's hard to explain my toughts about that)
Most people would plan a siege in advance and sieges have a declaration period, which gives everyone time to prepare and travel.
I think without the summon it might be too much of a deterrent to playing with friends. If it came down to travelling for 20+minutes to meet up with your friend to play together for a couple of hours they might not want to vs using your single summon for the day to summon your friend and play together immediately.
You could also add a relationship meter. Add bonus exp gain to playing with each other and once capped out you can summon them once a day. Make it take a while and have it degrade over time. So if someone stops playing with you they won't be summonable.
It doesn't matter if you have 2 years to prepare 90min there and 90min back is still 3 hrs of your play time lost due to just traveling to that other level 5 node and back... and then because there are only 250 slots you might not even get to attack...imagine wasting 3 hrs of your time to not even get to be one of the 250 attackers
If you have time to prepare, then you have time to adjust your game activities so that maybe they take place closer to the siege and you only need to travel for 10 minutes.
If something is drawing your attention elsewhere in the world, 90 mins from the siege location, then that's your choice in determining your priorities. Instant travel shouldn't be offered for players to avoid having to make choices about what they do, when they do it, and where they do it. We could say the same thing about 'having to waste travel time' for every other activity in the game; that's not a good reason to give players an easy out.
Sieges aren't some disconnected minigame/arena that people should port to and from. Their geographic location matters and so should be tied to travel in the world.
If the objective is to help those players with very limited playtime, then maybe make the cooldown an account-wide timer that recharges when the player is offline.
Players who only play 1-2 hours will have it full recharged when they log in daily. Hardcore players who play all the time will have it recharge after many hours/1-2 days. More importantly, because play times vary, it becomes exponentially more difficult to synchronise the cooldowns among a large group of players so as to exploit it for zerg purposes.
Edit: there'll still be issues like allowing (very casual) people to use summoning to transport their most valuable gatherables on a regular basis and heavily mitigate the risk of land travel.
World Bosses
A guild could use the family summon to steal a world boss, but will the game even function like that? Will it be a tag system for world bosses or just whoever participates will get loot? If the case is that it is tag based then there could be a debuff after being summoned for some period of time that would reduce your damage so it would be harder to steal a tag.
Caravans
A small scouting party could summon a zerg to attack a caravan. However, based off of how caravans have been shown off, you have to designate yourself as an attacker to engage the caravan. I think a cool down for being able to flag for a caravan after being summoned could eliminate the pop up zergs that would gank caravans. But, the zerg could simply wait out the cool down while following the caravan. Or it could be that players have a debuff for pvp once summoned and so it would be advantageous for the caravan defenders to attack the zerg once they see it summoned in so they aren't followed until the zerg is at full fighting capacity. Of course taking the initiative could lead to corruption issues. Another idea is making it so that summoning doesn't work within a large radius of a caravan, but this could be used to tell if there is a caravan present to begin with. Maybe there could be a cap to how many people may flag as attackers dependent on the number of people flagged as defenders? However, this could also be exploited where a big zerg would have some people flag as defenders to increase the cap. Overall, I think we will need to see this one implemented in order to know how it will truly be effected by family summon.
Instantly Moving Loot
There's the idea of having alts set up in different cities so you could fast travel with trade goods to skip the risk of a caravan altogether. This could also be seen on a smaller scale, you have a friend out mining who sees gankers coming so they ask you to family summon them to get themselves and all their farm back to town safely. The solution could be to make it so that players can't be summoned with resources on them. The issue is going to be weapons, armor, tools and other items that could be sold but you wouldn't necessarily want to prohibit a player from being summoned without their gear. There would be no reason to have the family summon at that point. Hypothetically, even if alts could only instantly move what they are wearing it could still be an effective way to move high tier items with no risk. I think in this case it would be wise to have a very long cool down on the family summon feature as suggested above by many. It would at least cut down on the effectiveness of moving items in this manner.
Sieges
I think it goes without saying that family summons shouldn't work during sieges or after the siege has been successful. People could go and scout freeholds and then summon their family to attack the freehold during the period after a successful siege.
I'm sure there are more uses of the family summon that could raise concern, but as with all the concerns listed above, it is completely dependent on how the game systems are implemented. 9 times out of 10, it is too soon to tell if it will be an issue or not. All we can do as a community is voice our support and concerns to help make this game as good as it can be.
The fact party size is 8 and family size is 8 tells me it has nothing to do with real life family but instead so if you always group with the same group you can get together quickly
Caravans: I’m a guild leader with 200 members. I break up 64 players by class 8 of each Tank, Mage, Rogue etc. I give each member a letter in each class (A-H) I tell each letter member to go out with a group based on the letter they were assigned. “A” goes North, “B” goes NW, “C” goes NE, etc. You just covered 8 points of the compass with an optimal group (all 8 classes) searching for caravans to roll. Group A hits a caravan with 15 defenders, guild leader tells A to summon families and only B-D to accept summons. You now have a 32 on 15 person zerg. Now group E comes across another caravan with 20 defenders 5 mins later, guild leader tells group E to summon all to accept, now you have a 64 member zerg. This is a problem. If you only send out 7 groups, guess what you can pull everyone back. Another problem.
Economy: Well I just grabbed 100 logs in the forest, now I want to go to the desert biome, poof I’m there. Sure it might take me a while to get to the biome that needs trees but it might just be worth the travel time. On an aside if we allow multi-box there can now be an anchor in a major metropolis.
There are more problems but I think these two are enough to start the discussion.
The guild meta WILL be 8 man family squads for teleportation advantage. (or whatever it turns out to be).
Just my opinion though.
And remember you can only summon where you stand, so at least one member of family must go to the spot, you do summoning from. And if you want to summon whole "zerg" guild, at least one of each family members must be in that spot, which really means zergs cant move that fast even with this summoning.
So then a question is, if single people could even get in to that spot alone. Maybe everyone going together would be even faster.
I think people are worried here too much. I think its really great idea for convenience (its something similar to WOW lock summoning, though this one is more limiting that you can only summon one person and get CD, where lock in WOW can summon as many as he wants, given there are 2 randoms nearby and he has shards).
It would really make it convenient, where let say half of party is already there and somone else logs on at last moment. So you can just summon them, instead of waiting let say 30min till they get in spot you gonna farm or do whatever.
And if it proves to be easy to exploit, it is always possible to nerf it. But lets not jump to conclusions thats its gonna be bad without seeing it.
Maybe instead of making it so your inventory is empty either
A ) Making it so all item's in your inventory have a cooldown timer keeping them from being transferred, traded, sold, or stored after a family member summoned them.
or
B ) Make it so that picking up items, gathering, etc., puts a timer on the summoning system preventing you from using it until the timer ticks back down to zero. That timer could have a max time that refreshes as you pick up more items, etc, or increases based on the amount of gathered resources in your inventory, or the distance from the nearest node in which the resource was gathered.
The only real concern with this system is multiboxing for people to effectively make a portal for 15 bucks. And you can certainly work around that too.