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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Tier 3/Tier 4 clan support
HellFrost
Member
I've played L2 for a long time. I've been in Tier 1 and Tier 2 clans for the longest time but due to life eventually moved to Tier3/4 clans and I can tell you that life really becomes very boring for Tier 3/4 clans. One of the problems is obviously lack of strong organizational structure and the other is lack of incentive, because players know Tier 1/2 clans will come and swoop your ass so they don't even bother trying. While few moments against other tier 3/4 clans are very nice and rewarding because you are fighting same level players as you.
Is there any mechanics planned to support Tier 3 / 4 clans? Like over-laying events where Tier 1 event like raid spawn would also coincide with less important raid spawns at the same time, allowing smaller tier clans claim lesser raids, because tier 1 clans are too busy to protect more important raids.
Is there any mechanics planned to support Tier 3 / 4 clans? Like over-laying events where Tier 1 event like raid spawn would also coincide with less important raid spawns at the same time, allowing smaller tier clans claim lesser raids, because tier 1 clans are too busy to protect more important raids.
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https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Guilds#Guild_progression
As you're leveling up the guild and you're getting these points to either allocate towards expanding the guilds member count or allocate towards adding certain passive abilities that your guild members can gain by being guild members. You're also going to see as you're leveling up the guild through different type of quest-based, participation-based, node-based, organization-based systems and ways that those quests hook into the world. You're also going to see perhaps some augment abilities at the upper tiers of the guild levels become unlocked for certain members that have a classification of officer or knight, will have access to those different types of augment abilities that might get unlocked should you go down the non expansive member lane; and the idea there is to offer these benefits to smaller groups. – Steven Sharif
That being said, I don't know how any of that relates to how L2 handles clans. My guess is that you should throw all of that out of the window and not worry about it, because what AoC will be doing will probably bear very little resemblance to L2.
I think the only thing they are taking from L2 is the penalty for nonconsensual PvP, and even that isn't going to be a total copy, but rather an adaptation.
I dunno, I guess that could happen in Ashes of Creation, but I wouldn't worry about it until it does happen.
In Lineage 2 people also had this option but it never ever was effective. No offence but what are you suggesting in reality almost never happened in my 10 years of Lineage 2. Organizational structures of Tier 1 / 2 guilds are simply superior. The amount of cooperation required for such feat with less organized people is almost impossible to achieve due to issues with authority, loot/benefit distribution etc.
There were attempts, but at the first sign of things going south these resistance alliances disband quite quickly, because top guilds are able to put enough pressure on smaller guilds to make this happen. To make things worse, people get conditioned to the fact that they will not achieve anything anyway and don't even try or even if they do, they do half measure.
The only way for Tier 3 / Tier 4 guilds to have their own meta is to have at least some activities to split and happen at the same time. So for example raid bosses would spawn every day from 20:00 to 21:00. Meaning top guilds will be busy fighting over more important raids, where lower tier guilds will be fighting for less important raids while both will be having fun at the same time. However if you have raids spawn for example from 18:00 to 23:00 at random, most of the raids will be taken by top tier guilds.
It's not about how clans/guilds are handled in game, it's about how TOP GUILDS/Clans consume 90% of the content leaving almost nothing for lesser guilds to fight for.
I will give you example with open world raid bosses. Lets say we have 2 tiers of raid bosses. Tier 1 raid bosses have high chance for full items and fragments to craft full items. Where tier 2 bosses have very low chance for full items and high chance for craftable fragments. Now imagine that we have 20(10 tier 1 raids / 10 tier 2) raids that spawn randomly from 18:00 to 23:00 server time.
Scenario #1
In this scenario top tier guilds will dominate both Tier 1 raids and Tier 2 raids, leaving almost nothing to smaller clans simply because statistically raids will spawn far enough apart that they will be able to kill a raid and move to another raid.
Scenario #2
However if we make raids spawn only between 20:00 and 21:00 and we have 20 raids top guilds will not have enough time to consume all the raids, they will have to focus on most important ones. This leaves opportunity for tier 3/4 guilds to fight over tier 2 raids as top guilds are busy with tier 1 raids.
In Lineage 2, raids would spawn 8/12 hours after kill with +/-4 hour random window. So all the raids were almost always taken out by top guilds. Even raids that dropped lesser tier gear, because they could sell that gear for adena(gold). Hence my suggestion, to design systems in a way that activities would overlap, preventing domination of all content by few clans.
In order to play an MMO, guilds need to know that they have access to some content.
It needs to be assumed that any open world content of any actual value will be dominated by three guilds per server - because it will be.
Maybe not the same 3 guilds for all content, but yeah, I could see strong guilds dominating their own turf in different places. And that could squelch progression for others.
I know that competition is going to be the lifeblood of this game, but if you have guilds that can monopolize content you are effectively removing any competition. It's not competition if you never have a chance.
People who might counter with "git gud" are missing the possibility that you can never improve if you are locked out of the very content you need to access in order to advance enough to become competitive.
"We can't fight the Blood Wolves because our gear isn't strong enough."
"Then get better gear."
"To improve our gear, we need Moonsteel which requires Moonsilver ore that is only found in the Crimson Cavern, and the Blood Wolves guard it constantly."
First option, if you can't beat them, try to outnumber them. Recruit and make allies. If they are hogging all the resources, then your guild is most likely not the only one who is being left out.
A guild will most likely not be able to "locked down" an area 24/7. There will be times they are less active. As time goes on, their activity in an area will slow down as they gear up from the place and don't need as much from it.
The other option is to find something else to farm. Ashes is supposed to be a Sandbox, so it isn't supposed to have a linear path. Move somewhere with a similar value resource that is either next to guild that is friendlier or one that doesn't need a lot of it anymore.
If all else fails, since everything can be sold, you can focus on making money to buy what you need.
In my experience, this is not an effective way to counter large, powerful guilds. I have literally never seen a non-management approach work in any game, which is why I try to make it into the top competitive guilds on a server.
One reason why these approaches don't work is, as you stated, guilds can ally with one another. So, what you almost always have is a super guild that establishes feeder guilds at the low and mid levels and sister guilds to pump numbers up beyond the max of a single guild. I have seen this more often if the game is more PvP orientated. If established, these guilds will destroy servers.
Imagine you are leading a guild that is trying its best to get on in Verra. You're good players, but not at the top - and you are smart enough to know this.
Now imagine you have two guilds offer you a proposal.
One guild says "ally with us to try and beat these top end guilds, so that we can get the occasional kill on the weekly spawning raid mobs. If we ever manage that, your guild can occasionally get some loot from the kills".
The second guild says "we have been killing these mobs for months, and have most of the loot from them that we want. However, we don't want these upstart guilds claiming they have taken kills from us so we plan to keep killing them long after the loot is of any real use to us. They are mass recruiting right now, so we will need numbers in order to achieve our goal. If you join us in this, you and what other guilds join will get to share in the loot basically straight away, without our guild taking any as we have no need for it any longer".
As a guild leader, with responsibilities to your guild members, which deal do you think is best? The side that are trying to stop the top end guild will need more people, which means the loot is spread out thinner - and they are less likely to win. The top end guild side is more likely to win, has a core component that don't need the loot, will need fewer people due to having better gear in that core, and have proven that they know what they are doing.
To me, it's a really easy decision as to what would be best for my guild, if I were given these two options.
As I said, there're work arounds even without instanced content. You just need to make sure there would be priorities for guilds and all the events happening at the same time. This would greatly reduce top guild interference in low levels of matters.
Yes and no. Yes, the "best" content will be dominated by the top guilds and that's just part of the game. No, they shouldn't add instanced content. Rather, there should be such an abundance of content that naturally changes, by either node progression or world events, that it's not a consistent issue.
Your desire for that amount of content is honestly unreasonable. Development of top end content is time consuming - individual encounters can take several months in some cases.
Top end guilds will monopolize content for the sake of monopolizing it.
So, in a realistic setting, the top end content in the game will always be able to be dominated by a few guilds.
This has always been the case for open world content. It is the very nature of open world content. In fact, it is the very reason developers add open world content to games now over instanced content - so that one guild will dominate it and t he rest will essentially pine after it (Steven has said he wants some content in the game that is there for most players to aspire to, rather than for most players to patriciate in).
They can automate it like most of the nodes other features. I don't see this game having events or boss encounters as detailed as Final Fantasy XIV, so, it shouldn't be a problem.
Alright... and? If the node system is as grand as the developers are making out, it shouldn't be a consistent issue. There will be fluctuations of guild dominance, rather than an Arche Age incident where half of a nation can't farm in a predefined area because an entire guild is gatekeeping it, etc.
If we have a game with no instanced content, and all open world content is crated using an automated system, then we have a game with absolutely shit PvE. With Intrepids design goals for Ashes, the game will only be as good as the PvE content, so lets all hope that this isn't what will happen (it isn't what will happen, we know there will be instanced content).
We aren't really talking about farming, we are talking about killing content designed to be taken on at the guild level. Not at the individual level, nor at the group level - but at the guild level.
Yes, which is why that was not the only thing i mentioned. It's an option you can try and in some situations it might work, some it might not. A lot of a these situations won't have one surefire solution and players will have to figure out their way through it.
Indeed.
However, this could take time (months is a reasonable time frame).
In the time it takes to work through a solution, these guilds still need a game to play at the guild level, otherwise they wouldn't bother sticking around to work out that solution.
Again, this is why instanced content needs to exist. It isn't and shouldn't be the top end of guild focused content - if it were, guilds would have no need to work through a solution to the above issue. However, it needs to exist so that guilds that are working through these issues (which will be most guilds wanting to operate at that guild level, honestly) still have a game to play.
I really don't understand how people can't grasp the basic concept that people (and/or guilds) need content in order to stick around in a game.
How long do you honestly think a guild that wants to raid would stick around in a game if they are unable to do so?
Owning castles, running a guild, learning to craft, fishing...all these things are part of having fun in our game worlds. But I am a bit saddened that the game makers have focused on Raids so much that the incoming generation of gamers see them as the core of the game.
For me, and I know I may be in the minority here, raids are a fun incidental part of gaming...but not a particularly important part of the game. I am looking forward to the community, the politics, the node building, the non-level progression in societies (like religion or bounty hunting), the crafting, the building of my freehold or housing, the improvement of my reputation as a healer (or whatever) as the sources of my pleasure in the game. Yeah, I will enjoy raiding, but that won't be particularly high on my 'to do' list.
For starters, my original comment had nothing to do with your instance recommendation. Atama mentioned a situation and I was bringing up options a group could take in that situation.
Yes, there needs to be content post max level and instances are an option for it. Do they need to be instances, I don't think we can tell until we play it. Just because a guild is locking down one area doesn't mean there can't be other areas to farm.
I think you are not getting my point. I just used raids as example to make my point how you can't avoid dominating guilds to lock down content. This so far happened in every single sandbox MMO ever.
What I mean:
"Event A happens 19:00 server time"
"Even B happens 20:00 server time"
"Event C happens 21:00 server time"
This is literally the most common scenario in most sandbox games and top guilds have enough time to finish "Event A" and move to "Event B" and later to "Event C" this way locking the content.
I'm rising the concern that open world content should happen in close enough time window so guilds would have to choose which ones are more important to fight over and couldn't lock it down.
I was responding to Noanni in that comment.
I can agree with that. I think another factor could be the size of the map and lack of fast travel. You can't just finish an event and port to another.
The thing both of you are missing here is that this game is reliant on that conflict. Open world mobs exist to be fought over. You can't fight over mobs if you are the only guild that shows up to them.
If you have 6 raid mobs and spawn them all at the same time, you may allow 6 guilds to get kills, but you also kill off a huge amount of competition on each - and in fact may not have any conflict at most mobs.
Open world mobs are about conflict and contest. That can't and shouldn't change.
As such, these encounters simply aren't the answer to ensuring all guilds have something to do. That is literally the opposite of what open world encounters are designed to do.
You then also have the smaller guilds in the node zone of influence either settling for content lower down the pecking order or banding together to try and dethrone the big fish.
We wont know until live if the politics will play out this way but i hope it does. There will for sure be some instanced content but i will agree that inserting conflict into the game at all avenues will build the community and in a natural way incentives people to group up.
80 20 open world to instance is the rough plan and that sounds fine to me.
The thing is that with my suggestion of the system design were for example all open worlds raids would spawn within 1 hour of server time during prime time, the top guilds would still be taking icing on the top leaving smaller guilds to fight for other parts of the pie. There would still be desire to attempt better raids but the smaller guilds would not be left with nothing.
Basically my vision for guild activities design would look like that:
19:00 -20:00 server time all open world raids are spawning
20:00-21:00 node battles or w/e
21:00-22:00 Some other activity.
Rest of the time players could focus on solo/party play.
The thing is, if you will let bigger guilds dominate everything, there will be a problem with player retention. Eventually smaller guilds will give up, get bored and move on. We know how this will play out because this so far happened in every single sandbox MMORPG ever. This will leave only few most hardcore players, which often is not enough to support the game longterm.
My suggestion doesn't eliminate political aspect, drama or aspiration aspect, it just forces top guilds to prioritize the content they want to control but also leaving carrot on the stick for smaller guilds to try and move up the ladder while still having fun doing some raiding and fighting.
These days MMORPG's live and die by the content. Just look at New World. Most people will leave the game due to lack of content if top guilds are allowed to take all the raids and nodes and really the only solution is to saturate this content in some sort of time frame, where top guilds would physically not be able to gobble everything up.