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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
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.
Comments
I'm afraid this will be the case whatever the level of the NPCs, even 50-55. The original occupants of the castles are merely temporary gate keepers.
Just going to copy/paste from the wiki...
How long is this "period of time to level up" that guilds will have? All castles locked down for the first x months from being live? Locked until some world event is completed (long server quest, first node reaching metropolis stage, world boss defeated, whatever...)? Locked for guilds until they've reach a certain level, or buy a guild perk? Need to procure loads of materials, just like a city siege, to initiate the battle against the NPCs?
All that doesn't remove it from being end-game content, but, depending how the unlocking is done, it might be possible to work toward that before reaching max level. It might still be a race, but hopefully not only a levelling race.
I am a bit tired and I didn't understood. Thanks for the patience to explain in detail.
Lots of discussion around what Endgame is and what it means to players, which is neat to read.
I'd be curious to see more examples relating to the OP topic of Castles, and examples of concerns, or thoughts on changes or aspects of this system players would like to see
If there's only 250 slots and these slots can be filled up on first come first serve basis - what's stopping a big guild from registering their own people as attackers (from subguilds or from bought merc guilds) and preventing the entirety of the rest of the server from participating in the siege?
That is my main concern with the system as it has been presented so far. If guilds can just fill up attacker slots with their own people - there's no reason to build up castle nodes, no reason to buff defenses, no reason to register defenders. And this then leads to big rewards for the holders of the castle, because castle rewards grow with time if you keep defending the castle month after month.
The obvious solution is to just completely randomize who gets into the siege, but then you're completely dissolving any guild-based relations on the server and sieges are viewed as poor content.
If this is a guild-based siege, it shouldn't be random people; it should be a guild in charge of attacking it. Even more so, since they are the ones who make the scroll in an attempt to claim it.
Though anyone can register and slots will be auto-filled, the guild in charge of the attack can move people and do what they want in the organization (player selection and anything else they need to do as well).
With a set guild organizing to attack the castle, you aren't going to find the issue where it's random and anyone can just attack it and have their own guild members trying to make the war a throw. You would need some systems in place to decide what guild gets to attack. The best way, in my opinion, is for there to be a period where you can choose to declare war on the castle, and it picks based on the guilds that decided to declare at random for who would be leading it.
Personally, I feel a month is a long wait, though, and these should happen more often so there is a higher chance the castle can get passed off to another guild. And it just creates more PvP content for people and more of a resource sink.
Cause former just means that the defending guild is the first one to lay the scroll and then just pick their own people, while the latter is countered by registering a shitton of 1-character guilds to the siege and winning the rng lottery.
I guess you could put some limits on what kind of guild can register for a siege, but then where's the cutoff on that limit and how would that cutoff not be overcome by the defending guild simply doing some work for it (which would probably be easier than risking their entire castle in a proper siege)?
I've been discussing it with the May 10th Q&A guys.
They said... "Other Guilds have just as much opportunity to fill up the slots."
Basically - not a bug.
Also, unless each guild gets a completely unique quest for the scroll - defending guild can PK people who are doing the quest, so slow down their progress.
And as soon as someone lays down the scroll - they can fill up the slots if they have enough members.
How I see this going down:
If this doesn't seem like a very difficult situation to avoid the exploit - I dunno what is. Defending allies have the easiest route to the exploit, while everyone else has to jump over several hoops and fight off a, supposedly, stronger foe while jumping those hoops.
Key points
Problem with castle sieges being locked at lvl 50
So what I've read the problem is mobs are lvl 50 and not really giving players who are a lower level a chance to compete basically locking it into end game content. Far as my concern goes there are no bracket leveling system in place so even if you were to lower the NPC lvl say 35-40 whats to stop lvl 50 players coming in and just destroying everything easily.
problem with castle owner reaping the benefits to essentially power game.
Seems like that put the defenders at a disadvantage -_O_- wont know till we actually see it in game. Also this is why Alpha / beta exist.
Five guild castles and 8-10k player base on a server I don't really see someone reaping the rewards without paying a heavy price/time to maintain the castle also if you are worried about people having elite gear the quotes said crafted items will be on par with boss dropped items so I do not see castle owners having better gear then the attackers in a long term status.
Problem with registration
When you're signed up to participate a siege regardless if attacker or defender your account should get locked in applying you cannot have alt sign up when you're already signed up on another character. ( no quotes just my 2 cents on what should happen)
Very simple you make the scroll for your guild to attack you organize it. THere should not be any element of random people just cause competitive pvp that you are using your own resources to dec and siege the castle.
You aren't just going to register tons of one character guilds, as designers where will be rules in place and resources needed to even dec the place to begin with.
The castle should be a major drain in itself as well IMO. When something has a high cost people are more prone to give it away in time. The cost can be something other than gold and can be more in the form of materials and such (but not rely trying to get too into that) The point is it would be another kind of pressure that pulls resources / cost.
There always needs to be rules on stuff, technically you can make the argument at any level that the guild could do more by recruiting everyone on the server into a one guild alliance and not having any worry. And than killing the server do to no competition. (This is why it is important for competitive content to not be a zerg fest as they can't use numbers to win. And slowly kill off the server AKA Throne and liberty)
Create competition have multiple levels of content and resources drains and you will have people less likely to try to game the system. Lets say they for some reason spend all their resources to jump into the lottery multiple times and it works out. Than they would be extra drained from doing much else or doing this again for the next siege. People in their guild not even like the idea of it cause their could be a higher chance they just waste time farming all those materials.
This is also why id rather them having to defend more than just once a month both from a content perspective and making it less likely to waste time wanting to game the system.
Granted it doesn't mean people are always going to be doing this, as in new world I didn't see people self dec themselves during my time playing it. You aren't going to have perfect solutions in any feature. And in BDO people would use zergs / power and agree to not attack each other and rotate castles/nodes. Which to me that is a lot more of a exploit and makes content stale.
Only if they need to defend the castle properly, but right now there's a fairly easy exploit for that, as laid out above.
Right now castles will give part of their taxes to the owning guild to use, so if the defending guild is somehow not already super strong (most likely will be btw) - they can simply buy gear.
Yes, they'll need to defend their tax caravans and might fail in doing that, and I would definitely love if that's the case, but until proven wrong I'm almost sure that only the strongest guilds will own castles, which means that they'll have a much higher chance to defend their stuff.
As explained in the comment above, you wouldn't really need to use alts, as long as you have a 250-member sub-guild, that just needs to register first and fill up all the slots.
The randomizing counter was only in response to a part of Mag's suggestion of "make it random which guilds gets to join the guild". I'd personally prefer if we didn't have randomizers for this at all, purely because imo that's a very bad way to go about designing this particular feature.
The problem is that Castle content is not accessible before players on the server reach Level 50.
Which means - Max Level is when the real game starts. And Leveling to 50 is basically just a time-sink grind.
I guess I missed that being stated as a problem.
Interesting solution but I think does not fit the game design - especially not for an RPG.
Alts on an account should not be held responsible for the actions of the other character(s) on the account (unless the devs are banning the player).
I think the concern is not about alts, though.
I think the concern is that large outside-game Mega-Guilds could fill up all the registration slots with numerous sub-guilds that have created in-game Guilds. No alts needed for success.
Do you mean "the one who laid the scroll first decides who can participate"? Cause first of all, all guilds need to lay down their own scroll to start putting their members into the siege. This isn't like Node sieges where anyone can come and join in on the siege after a single person laid the scroll.
Second of all, like I said above, it's way easier for the defending allies to lay their scroll, so if they get full control of participants - that's even worse than the current exploit.
This goes directly against the "the longer you have the castle - the higher the benefits from it". If castle costs are higher than benefits - no one will want the castle and no one will fight for it, which would remove the best piece of pvp content in the game.
And if costs increase with the benefits, but not during the first month - first defenders will simply keep shifting the owner guild back&forth to maximize the profits and remove the costs (outside of the scroll quest cost).
That staleness is exactly what I'm trying to counter here. Yes, zergs can lead to the same thing, but zergs is a political thing, not a mechanics-based exploit. Players can still beat zergs by either being better or bringing their own zerg. But you can't beat an exploit, if the exploit itself prevents you from doing anything to beat it.
We'll have castle node sieges every week for that. Though again, this only matters if the exploit is gone.
I guess The one who completed the siege quest, and thus started the siege preparation, should be able to choose which of the registered attackers can participate. Since the defenders will be an organized force, the attackers should be also.
And now the problem would be how to restrict the one completing the quest to not be from the same guilds (or even previous guild if he left in order to not restrict his guild).
So if an attack fails - then all participating attackers + all guilds connected to them should be restricted from completing the siege quest for x amount of time, or x amount of following sieges.
Ofc this will still leave some space for exploits, But as long as 1 player that intends to do real siege complete the quest before the exploiters - it will result in real siege, which the defenders will lose if they didnt prepare for being sieged.
Also there should be penalties for attackers if they fail.
Like: if the 1 organizing the attack cant sign X amount of siege machines + resources + players - then his right for the siege are removed, and someone else gets the chance to organize. Ofc all the resources and siege machines are destroyed on a failed attack.
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/59378/castle-siege-idea/p1?new=1
is there content in ashes that doesn't require you to be level 50 to access it?
for a game to have levels as a time sink, and have the game start at max level, what % of that content needs to be at max level only? 50%, 90%, 99%? feel free to give me any number you think might be right.
now, what % of content does ashes have that can be only accessed at max level? how can you be so sure that leveling in ashes is just a time sink, based on only 2 things (castles and fh)
whats your opinion on bosses, quests or mobs that can only be killed/completed at max level? if you have bosses at level 30, 40 and 50, is the leveling process just a time sink because you cant kill all bosses at level 1? i mean, you could walk up to the bosses at level 1 but you might not be able to kill them. you might not even be able to kill a level 30 boss as soon as you hit level 30...
I could maybe see this working if the penalty only applies when castle nodes are below a certain lvl (ideally at least lvl3). This way, at least the defending guild will still have to allocate time to work on their nodes and stuff, and won't just sit on their laurels.
Only one scroll wins who can dec, not multiple people ONE guild. Multiple guilds can jump in the lottery but there is only one winner who leads the war. It is pretty standard.
I just finished explaining on this i really don't want to retype what i just did you exploit point is extremely weak imo. A bigger exploit is when you can do uncapped zergs and than pass the castle without fighting.
Having more most / risk to holding it longer doesn't go against anything. If there is more benefit for holding it longer than means there should be multiple forms of difficult with that as well. You really can't tie it going against anything because it is harder, there is a saying "get Gud"
Also i feel you are reading into my point and changing to meaning to fit your own narrative here to try to make my point seem like its going against some special design. I'll explain a bit further that cost would naturally be higher requiring people to spend more time and for it to be a resource sink naturally. That cost a mix of the upkeep cost, building defensives and other potential features. You can gain more benefits for holding it longer it just becomes more challenging allowing other people to have a chance as well.
The point of exploiting and castling throwing is moot, Also that isn't possible unless you are using the narrative no one ever decs on the castle except the owners which makes 0 sense.
Zergs is not a political thing is one of the worse gaming mechanics that ruins games allowing any numbers of people to attack. Its not really hard to convince someone to attack something and to make money doing it. Again i don't think u understand the damage zergs does to a game, even in face of throne and liberty which had a server die because of it. I'm guessing no matter how much it happens peoples don't understand until they play on a server that dies and they can't do anything about it.
I'm going to go out and say overall you are trying to ride on this one single exploits in your mind and I don't see that as being a issue. With the proper resource sinks, constant fights and a good rule set it will be deemed as a waste of resources / time. There isn't a situation where they should be able to over flood any kind of raffle, at worse case they have their alt guild able to throw a vote in that they have been equally leveling up with members and gathering resources in.
Of course you have strict rule sets so they can't guild hop back and forth to defend sieges and such. Making them split up their members even more so that they might want to defending. Cause other guilds to have an advantage when attacking, etc.
Edit*
to add tot his do to the size of castle sieges of course you are going to rely on your guild alliances, making it more difficult to jump in and out of an alliance without gimping yourself. As you just prevent them from leaving and being able to join and help with the next siege as they dec'd against it.
This exploits is weak when you actually have measures to in to make it not a realistic way to play the game.
Was unaware of the taxes part and not big fan of the scroll idea from what im seeing. Also I dont know how many players 1 of the 3 nodes will hold... so cant really make a argument
ahh I see, but looking at a developer stand point not sure how you can make it any lower with out adding more castles base around lower leveling and adding a level cap so it cannot be exploited by higher levels, but doing so will just lead players to specific nodes that fit their level range.
for some reason I didn't even think of a sister/brother guild my mind went straight to alts lol
You've once again completely blurred the lines between node sieges and castle sieges, which is why I had to reread all your statements several times.
No, there isn't a single guild that "leads the siege". I dunno which games that is standard in, but that's not Ashes (nor was it L2, where Steven got inspiration from). But ok, you WANT that to be the case.
And if that were the case, you want different guilds to register and then the game randomly picks one of them to "lead the siege", and this Leader can then pick attackers out of the registered guilds. Is that a correct summation of your suggestion?
If that is correct - I refer to my point of registering a ton of mini-guilds to try and win this lottery, or even just paying off some casual/small guilds to register as well.
But I do agree that Intrepid should put in some designs in order to prevent this from happening. And considering my personal dislike of "randomness" when it comes to political mechanics of the game - I proposed a design that would address this
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/59378/castle-siege-idea/p1?new=1
I mean the guilds can still participate in next sieges, just the one who completes the quest + choose which guilds participate is different person.
So if a particular guild did great during the siege, but the attack still failed, the same guild can be picked again for the attack by the new organizer
We're talking about the start of the game and/or new servers. There would be no higher-lvled people when castles are filled with lvl35 mobs.
The automatic ideas in this game will be lacking, so dont expect things like random dungeon finder, or press button to find group for raid. And since the game is focused on the social aspect, would make sense the siege to require social stuff also
This conversation is happening on several parallel sets of designs right now, which is making my head hurt, trying to follow all of these designs and arguments for their respective steps of separation from what the currently presented design is.
So for now I'm out of this convo. I explained myself to the best of my ability. I proposed a solution to my perceived problem here
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/59378/castle-siege-idea
Now it's up to Intrepid to decide if my problem is even a problem in their eyes.
That's not what I meant by 'automatic'. I hope that this was clear to others, but in case it wasn't...
I meant 'considering the design factor requirements of NiKr's goals/wishes, this is the solution that emerges from applying the constraints, automatically'.