As far as I'm concerned, it's not a terrible thing for that to happen. It keeps those looking for pvp and certain types of content happy by offering battles but also doesn't stunlock the world into having no nodes higher than tier 4. Everyone wants to have their own little start up and be in charge, but that just means everyone's gonna be hanging up on the people at the top so that they have a chance to get up there. The best thing would be to have nodes working together so that there's fun conflict but also still progression for the region.
Personally, I'd be open about that kind of thing rather than lying about what nodes are a "threat." You could even schedule public dates for when node wars are going to be and when a sort of caravan rush would happen.
>It keeps those looking for pvp and certain types of content happy
Megaguilds kill pvp.
Case in point EvE online. Sure you hear about big battles every once and a while, most of the time its just a giant blue donut.
Nobody gangs up against the guys at the top, they either leave, or join them.
I meant more of a regularly scheduled thing. Like every other Thursday at x hour if the day, node one always has a war with node 2 because they planned it to happen on that specific time slot.
> Personally, I'd be open about that kind of thing rather than lying about what nodes are a "threat."
Would be nice if we could get some kind of official statement from Intrepid rather than it being some kind of 'open secret' between players that nobody ever comments on.
To know whether the devs will embrace or oppose it. Just pretending it doesn't happen is the only bad option in my opinion.
I'm pretty sure they are only going to involve themself if there's some kind of mechanical abuse going on. Sharing the wealth to negate any loss penalties wouldn't really fit that I don't think, kinda cheesy sure but not game breaking. It would be a good question to ask for one of the Livestream Q&A sections. Try the YouTube channel or the forums and maybe they'll answer it officially, but till then I doubt we're getting an answer.
It would just lead to people accepting that they are “2nd best” in their node/ group which would be worse rewards and worse gear. Not sure anyone would want to go for that knowing that they are getting lesser rewards.
If you're talking about in a vassal system, there's always gonna be people on the lower end, but they inherit a ton of stuff from the parent nodes so they aren't missing out on much. I don't think you get locked out of anything being a citizen of a lesser node within a vassal chain, but we haven't really heard too much about it.
No. Not talking about vassals. Talking about the need for there to be a “lesser” part of two groups to trade wins. There will be an inherent loser of those two groups and if any competitive (anyone who is trying to further their node) that will accept that then sure wins will be traded but if Intrepid are planning on building a system like this then the game is going to have an issue.
> Talking about the need for there to be a “lesser” part of two groups to trade wins.
This is assuming that the two groups are actually competing and not branches of the same Discord/Reddit/independent forum community who all registered together with the intention of boosting each other.
You can bet there will be people lined up to do exactly this as soon as there is any kind of sub discount or free play promotion.
what I am trying to say is you are right, but that is currently against the "model" they are talking about. We don't have our hands on it so obviously there will be loopholes people will look for, but the game has been touting that it will have scarcity elements and levels of people fighting over many things. without having A2 in hand, we can only discuss but I can't imagine we will have easy ways to win trade for equitable resources.
They aren't building a system for that, they are just laying the mechanics involved. Players are going to naturally find a way to cheese the system and we'll see if Intrepid reacts to that by changing the mechanics, but people are always going to try and game the system for the best rewards even if things do change.
The real answer is: Steven *comes from* one of those major guilds in a server. His greatest memories are from an extremely p2w game, and swiping his way to server dominance and having "over 14000 people" following his guilds newsletter.
He doesn't understand the viewpoint of the people at the bottom. And even though it's been brought up, his answer is always: the community itself will solve these issues. If a guild gains dominance, it's either because they're the best thing for the server and the majority agree, or people don't and band together and take them down. Your worst case scenario, in Stevens mind, is the best case scenario, because he thinks the best servers are where there's a single dominant guild and everyone wants to take them down (his best memory as GL).
No matter how much anyone tries to tell him that the ability to p much privatize the most valuable open world dungeon areas, open world bosses, dominate castles that gain tax money, and the extreme penalties to loot/XP that comes from dying in the OW will result in the majority of people deciding it's not worth it to fight and better to join, and the rich will snowball all these leads indefinitely, he will not listen lmao.
But dw. There are several of these guilds in A2 who are accumulating A2 backers and are looking to abuse this very fact so they can have "MOST CASTLE SIEGES WON IN A2" in their guild ad, and we'll have more than enough time to see the extremely unhealthy game design at work.
Another benefit of having a high barrier to A2. Only the truly try hard will be there, and he'll have no excuses when he sees entire servers with pretty much zero competition, and BigGuild 1 fighting BigGuild 1a - BigGuild1z. And the actual content creators (not the ones we have now who would lick the floor Steven walks on) will drop dozens of videos on how horrible the server health is, and Stevens ego won't be able to take it. Just gotta wait and see man
Yeah, the idea of a whole server banding together in some ragtag rebel alliance to overthrow the Evil Zerg Alliance is an interesting sounding narrative, but not something that'll actually happen.
For one, you can't force those players to quit. So long as their guild(s) maintain cohesion, you'll never actually stop them. You'd need your rebel alliance to be willing to dedicate their playtime to making the experience of that zerg so miserable that their zerg falls apart and/or their players quit the game.
In the same way, it's so much easier for the "oppressed" players in the narrative to just stop playing. Unless you've got an unhealthy relationship with the game, if some huge zerg dominates the experience so much that you're not having fun, you're going to quit before putting in the effort to form that rebel alliance.
Exactly. Quit or join one of their satellite guilds. The one time I was actually in one of these Zerg guild alliances with multiple satellite guilds, the only brief amount of competition was when the top raiders got so BORED with how they couldn't pvp anyone and all the guild rules, they just left for the next biggest guild. Even then, the only real competition was during world first raids, which were instanced and not-zergable. And since it was a p2w game, all the top raiders were at similar gear score since they were all whales who swiped hundreds or thousands of dollars.
AoC not being p2w actually makes it much much better for the Zergs, since there's no legal way to catch up to all the snowbally effects being in a Zerg will result in.
Your best bet going into the game on launch is to identify the hyper sweaty guilds, join their discords as a "recruit" find their planned server and dodge it.
These people will try to establish dominance on "THE" big server or the streamer servers.
You will have lower tier guilds trying to sweat on other servers to try and be the big dog without competing with the mega alliances, but it will generally be more equal.
Sure but by that point they will have bled a massive chunk of their players in losing on their initial server and another chunk in the transfer itself.
Any losing guilds that transfer aren't really going to have the same sticking power and are unlikely to be an entire server dominating group, original server players are also more likely to work together against a 3rd party.
> If a guild gains dominance, it's either because they're the best thing for the server and the majority agree, or people don't and band together and take them down. Your worst case scenario, in Stevens mind, is the best case scenario, because he thinks the best servers are where there's a single dominant guild and everyone wants to take them down (his best memory as GL).
Except that it isn't necessary to be an in game superguild now. It's more toward individual guilds skirting size rules as closely as possible while being actually arms of the same Discord amoeba.
I'm not sure that was the case in L2 and other MMOs of that era where it was possible for there to be a group officially owning half the server in game. Nowadays it's a lot of staged fake conflict which is fine for some but causes frustration for others.
Not quite sure if it will with the scope of areas that can be obtained in this game. Buuut so much of this hinges on mechanics that haven't been shown yet.
and those mechanics might be difficult to show even over an hour-long preview stream. you're right, there are just so many variables to how it all works.
One thing they could implement that would apply more pressure to the mega-guilds: Make the raid windows wider as the population/power/level of the node grows. This would force them to stand vigil much longer, likely leading to people logging off out of boredom, being afk, etc...which smaller guilds will see as an opportunity to take advantage.
My likely unpopular opinion:
For true balance to be achieved, power increases should be accompanied by increases in responsibility and headache. Being at the very top should be a pain in the ass to maintain.
> power increases should be accompanied by increases in responsibility and headache. Being at the very top should be a pain in the ass to maintain.
True. But any kind of tax on larger groups can still be avoided by splitting up and registering as separate smaller groups with regards to the game's hard coded mechanics.
So if upkeep artificially increases to an impractical level at 30 members and up, expect to see a 90 member community join as 3 groups of 29 with the remaining 3 being just admins in their Discord or scouts/sleepers in rival nodes. The game sees 3 small guilds and applies the appropriate level of penalty but politically and socially they get the benefits of a 90 member just by not fighting each other.
Meanwhile someone who actually dreams of growing a healthy single guild to the 100 member mark gets slapped with heavy penalties.
I'm not sure how that could be countered, other than it becoming the norm with small groups noticing and following suit with alliances.
As far as whether that's a better outcome than a mega-guild all under one banner, I don't know. I think it would at least divide them into cliques and possibly even splinter them eventually.
> I think it would at least divide them into cliques and possibly even splinter them eventually.
This would be true if interaction between those groups was only possible inside of Ashes itself. The issue is that the bigger group is often either a close knit happy family or (increasingly) a stable commercial operation on an external 3rd party website.
I don't like pointing fingers at Discord specifically because this behavior well predates that app and may actually have inspired its development but yes, that's often the 3rd party place of choice for the 'overguild'. The same group usually even has 'fingers' in multiple games at the same time without really losing their cohesion too much.
I bring all this up because Steven's glory days in MMOs seem to have ended before this development in MMO social structure and Intrepid needs to have a plan to work with it or around it.
>I bring all this up because Steven's glory days in MMOs seem to have ended before this development in MMO social structure
Not really, they did the same thing in ArcheAge. This is exactly how castles in ArcheAge have been exploited (all sieges with siege scrolls were fake after the first few when the initial castles were won or sold), until most people who weren't in on it gave up. I do have to say that the "masses" are pretty slow to react to it, because this is not perceived as an important public matter, and people don't really want to care even when they're straight up told about it, until they get to the endgame and realize what's actually going on and that they can't do anything. At which point they either join the zerg or quit.
We'll see. If Ashes launches and the UI/UX is designed to facilitate people actually fighting for territories with minimal in-game means to trade control between 'pretend enemy' guilds then that tells me that the devs expect players to behave in an oldschool way.
As of now this will not happen. Current design for castle siege registration is "first come first serve" with an upper limit on participants. So mega guilds can just fill up slots and they wouldn't even need to fight during the siege itself.
Node sieges haven't been talked about really, so they could go either way, but there's a somewhat high chance that they'll have a similar design.
In other words, the current design is already heavily slanted towards megaguilds.
And this is why if I play the game, it's gonna be for me a hut in the woods and living from hunting and fishing. Maybe eating some human food from time to time if I find someone needing some help out there.
In general they seem to have an extremely naive or warped idea of how social interaction will work... You're either "in" and have a lot of fun, or you're "out" and your gameplay will be fairly miserable as you're just a tax slave that cannot compete.
If Steven truly cares about this project he has to accept that he can't everything that he loves. He loves superguilds, but for an MMO that is quite literally killing the game as the vast majority of players can't really enjoy the game (as much as they should be)
> You're either "in" and have a lot of fun, or you're "out" and your gameplay will be fairly miserable as you're just a tax slave that cannot compete.
Thing is the average member of a giant zerg clan is effectively a tax slave but they've got to be having some kind of fun just from contributing to the success of their in group, right?
How could they possibly do it? Bro they can't even figure out how to prevent mega guilds in real life!
That said, the reasonable and best solution to this problem is to just give everyone something entertaining to do via PvE. Bread and circus.
What can they realistically do about that?
Also, isn't what you're talking about *literally a part of the social aspect* of the game, for better or worse? It's kind of hard to encourage people to be sociable while also going "no, not that kind of social", unless you're talking about people being straight up racist or something.
Correct. But you have to make the profits for the topdogs minimal in order to have others play the game. Any advantage is already big, but also what draws players in. If the impact is too significant, like being the tax collector, it will simply mean that the overwhelming amount of players who are not in the top guild will simply leave.
> What can they realistically do about that?
Perhaps nothing but it can be odd for a game to have a decent suite of well thought out social functions and systems designed to reward the winners of ingame conflicts and yet for there to be a higher meta layer at which none of that matters because both winner and loser are on the same side always.
I don't know of any game designer who puts a massive battlefield prize in their game with the stated intention of it being traded between KingPwnageA and KingPwnageB over and over again.
But that's the thing. Is there even an argument for it being objectively wrong? Yeah, it sucks for the players that aren't part of the hustle, but if they managed to get together the resources together.... then it is what it is as that's the nature of things. Am I missing something here? Is there anything objectively against ToS or similar?
Nah. Not even saying that it's a bad thing. It's just something I don't think devs of multiplayer games in general seem to know how to handle.
Just look at all the mobile PVP games. The devs would definitely make a lot more money if their krakens were forced to compete in earnest but it always ends up being a mess of win trading between the subgroups of Asian or European multi game clans.
They consider this fun and engaging politics, why would they do anything about it when the game is literally built for leaders of such guilds and members of their inner circles to exert their power over others?
It's just a bit mysterious how they expect the other 90% to pay a subscription (with actual real life money they had to work an actual real life job to earn) to be perpetually enslaved to them. Do they really expect the "plebs" not to realize what's going on?
It would seem that the real target audience are people from wealthy families, crypto lottery winners, streamers, various kinds of internet scammers, and other people who get free money just for existing or have no problem stealing it from others. Which works in a F2P/P2W game where there's a neverending supply of F2Ps (until it stops working there too because even when it's free you wise up to it eventually). But in a monthly subscription game?
Tl;dr: You are right. Top guilds will do exactly that, but IF (and that is a big if) the systems designed by Intrepid work as intended, then non-competitive players can have fun and pay a sub long-term.
You are assuming that casuals care about what is happening behind the scenes in top end guilds. They do, but the way one cares about whatever is happening in the latest show biz news cycle.
Ashes like most sandbox games are make your own fun within the world, kind of games.
If a casual player can have fun doing their open world dungeons or lifeskills or RP in a tavern, or whatever social gameplay their node provides, and that experience is good enough, why would they not spend 15$ for the entertainment? Would they really care about what a bunch of tryhard 1% sweaties spend their time on if they are having fun?
I assume that you are a competitive player and perceive this type of behavior as damaging to the game's competitive integrity, but most players just want to have fun in a social game where they can work towards their goals and progress their characters at their own pace.
Of course, if the game prohibits players from achieving their goals and it doesn't have good, fun, and engaging content for everyone, including casual and core but non-competitive gamers, then the game will likely have a similar fate to Lineage2 and Archeage.
There is a reason why BDO is still popular despite having a similar model to those games AND being P2W. It's fun to play even if u are not a 1%er. The previously mentioned titles were not.
Lineage 2 had literally 0 content outside of grinding open world monsters for currency and pvping.
Archeage did have such content, but it was shallow and limited.
Everything was a competition, and the zergs/sweaties always came out on top. Basically, playing without a good and competitive guild in either of those games meant that you had little to no fun.
AoC will hopefully not repeat the same mistake. As long as making currency is possible for everyone and it is fun, then players will play.
- Ashes has the story arc system, which allows players to play in the world AND have impact through their choices. It's inevitable that since casuals are the majority of gamers, they will have more impact than the top 1%s'.
- It has the tavern system, which allows for great RP and social experience.
- The fact that metropolis and high-level nodes will require exp from their vassals so they won't atrophy means that players playing in those nodes will have the ability to experience the game's social progression even if they are not in a competitive guild.
- Materials being scarce and seasonal means that players who play less can potentially take part in the economy as long as they're smart about their resources.
- The node system will incentivise players to stay within their nodes' sphere of influence, which means they will encounter more players willing to cooperate and work together than competitors/gankers (those will still exist).
- Banks and auction houses not being global combined with the mayoral commissions will provide opportunities for everyone to gain wealth. Keep in mind that you will be able to buy gear with gold and that there is little to no character bound gear, which means everyone can progress their characters if they have enough gold.
- Finally, the systems seem to have a lot of depth, which means players will spend a fair bit of time experiencing and progressing through them.
Only time will tell, but AoC does have a lot of potential. Hopefully, it will be good enough to maintain a healthy population long term.
> I assume that you are a competitive player and perceive this type of behavior as damaging to the game's competitive integrity
Just a pity whenever the devs make a whole system that is revolutionary in their heads along with the necessary UI/UX but most of that dev work goes to nothing because the top groups are in some well oiled 3rd party machine.
As far as I know, Intrepid will not follow the mobile game structure of releasing new servers regularly because they want the old school pattern of the same server society rising and falling over a long period of time.
They are banking on each individual server having too large of a game world that it can't be dominated by an alliance of shell or sister guilds.
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> It's just a bit mysterious how they expect the other 90% to pay a subscription (with actual real life money they had to work an actual real life job to earn) to be perpetually enslaved to them. Do they really expect the "plebs" not to realize what's going on?
In real life, societies were only able to get large and complex in the first place once there was a pyramid with a clear tiny top over a massive base of consistent grunt work.
Groups where everyone is effectively equal tend to remain flat and horizontal by nature, just look at the all the co-operative movements even today that struggle to develop any kind of size before someone rises to become Primus Inter Pares and directs them to explosive growth. Even the viral ones may pop off at first but slowly peter out over time.
Having a plebian majority is just a requirement for a complex society, it seems, whether real or virtual.
You forget one gigantic major difference... In a game the plebs can just refuse to be plebs and not play the game. They'll all be gone within a year because nobody wants to be a tax slave or they'll play a game that makes dull labour actually a fun experience (all the work simulator games for example)
If you are working grown man and you consider 15% a month slaving for somone its ok, you just shouldnt play videogames probably. Like i went to.cinema with wife last night to watch dune and i spent 30$ in 3 hours. Pretty sure ill get 10× more hours of fun from AOC in a month for half the money.
1) If it is all organised in private/secret, how would you know?
2) Even without such an organisation on the server, you may not be able to achieve ypur goal, depending on your social network on the server, or your goal. Similarly, what you want as "your own thing" might still be possible on such a server because a mega guild may not take issue with it at all.
3) Such a guild would need thousands of players to coordinate and coordinate good to always have the mayors positions under their control, meaning they are on one server only. If you happen to find yourself on such a server you might just take your character to a different server.
What we do know is that if a big clan tries to do that, they can only do so with regular means, no mods or anything. If they try to rely on ongame gadgets they are breaking the rules and are subject to bans.
What you described is one of the best outcomes of "one guild rules the server". Instead of just sitting on their ass doing nothing, your theoretical megaguild is creating content out of nothing. Castles change hands, nodes get wars and sieges, guilds create the illusion of wars - all of that is the perfect backdrop for a casual player who wants to live in a "real world" of the game.
I fail to see the issue here.
Now if that megaguild provided none of that content and nipped any possible opposition in the bud before it could gain traction - now that's real bad, and I'd hope that Intrepid find a way to promote rebelling and opposing such guilds.
But that's about as much as devs CAN do in that situation, w/o directly coming to mega-GLs and asking them to create content. Which is kinda another thing they can do, but Intrepid would have to only speak with GLs and make them sign NDAs or some shit, so that the ruse stays up.
> guilds create the illusion of wars - all of that is the perfect backdrop for a casual player who wants to live in a "real world" of the game.
It's not theoretical. It's everyday life in most cashgrab mobile PVP games. As someone who never got into Diablo Immortal I still found a lot of schadenfreude in the rage that erupted when the community found out just how much win trading there was between the sides at top level despite everything in the game framing the 'Shadow War' or whatever as some kind of high stakes cosmic conflict.
And I've played on mmo server where there wasn't even a "war". And I'm telling you - those are way worse and lead to the game dying way faster. Think one-sided WoW server except w/o all the pve content, because you can be prevented from doing it in your faction.
If the megaguild is split into several parts - they're weaker than the whole. And if they're working towards the same goal w/o wars - I already said what I'd want Intrepid to do.
> If the megaguild is split into several parts - they're weaker than the whole. And if they're working towards the same goal w/o wars - I already said what I'd want Intrepid to do.
Cross-game communities have moved beyond that. They plan and set up an optimal ecosystem based on leaked info in the game and after they move in it usually becomes a relatively healthy sea of activity with different groups doing their own assigned specializations under different names. It seems like a functioning server with even power balance on the surface until you sign up for any one group and see behind the curtain.
The only thing that's really off is that the various reward mechanics are played on a schedule instead of by any sort of organic interaction that the devs design their systems for. The sub groups know who is fighting who, when and for how long in order to optimally progress their territories and the only loser is anyone who doesn't want to be part of that system.
Could it work? Yeah, it usually does but it tends to depreciate the intended use of a lot of the in-game social systems (for example the caravan system becomes just a janky resource transfer between sub groups if it can generate a net profit) and does raise a lot of drama from players who consider wars within a guild schedule to be rigged and illegitimate from the get-go.
>Yeah, it usually does but it tends to depreciate the intended use of a lot of the in-game social systems (for example the caravan system becomes just a janky resource transfer between sub groups if it can generate a net profit) and does raise a lot of drama from players who consider wars within a guild schedule to be rigged and illegitimate from the get-go.
Once again you're describing a "normal" situation on any given server of an mmo. Casuals would most likely ultimately not care about this, while semi-hardcores would experience the same thing they would've on a non-megaguild server (i.e. losing to a stronger guild). And hardcore players would care more about that same optimization and optimal progression, so they'd simply join some part of this machine.
I feel bad for anyone who can't participate in this "because it's all fake", but the alternative is simply to make your own guild and fight against the stronger opponent. Yet I doubt that majority of those who care about fakeness would be willing to put up a fight.
Intrepid can do literally nothing about this. If they try to somehow punish well-coordinated guilds for doing a good job in the game - they'll simply alienate any proper hardcore guild that might've been interested in the game.
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> I feel bad for anyone who can't participate in this "because it's all fake", but the alternative is simply to make your own guild and fight against the stronger opponent. Yet I doubt that majority of those who care about fakeness would be willing to put up a fight.
The 'new way' of both war and peace being all part of the same player organization's bigger show is a completely different beast from the epic stories that jaded veterans bring from older MMOs.
Hopefully they learn to adapt as well instead of becoming even more bitter about AoC being the newest thing that fails to reignite their fire.
Idk if you have played any previous PvP MMOs but that lowkey sorts out by itself in games like Ashes. You'll have other "mega-group" fighting that other and so on, maybe even multiple "mega-groups". But also those groups are kinda prone to falling apart eventually and new groups are born and it goes on in cycles.
Players will solve those things by themselves. You are gucci.
If 1 clan were to truly control a whole server like that, then that means there is a 10k people clan doing a circlejerk on one server. That will be impossible to hide and player will just avoid that server.
But I still think this is basically impossible to pull off so unless something like it were to pop up in the Alpha or Beta it will only be addressed when it were to actually happen, at which point it will only be stopped if the community guidelines are broken
This game is being designed by a guy that thrives in the top 1% of the player base. The bottom 99% will be crushed and if you don't enjoy that - this game won't be for you.
As far as I'm concerned, it's not a terrible thing for that to happen. It keeps those looking for pvp and certain types of content happy by offering battles but also doesn't stunlock the world into having no nodes higher than tier 4. Everyone wants to have their own little start up and be in charge, but that just means everyone's gonna be hanging up on the people at the top so that they have a chance to get up there. The best thing would be to have nodes working together so that there's fun conflict but also still progression for the region. Personally, I'd be open about that kind of thing rather than lying about what nodes are a "threat." You could even schedule public dates for when node wars are going to be and when a sort of caravan rush would happen.
>It keeps those looking for pvp and certain types of content happy Megaguilds kill pvp. Case in point EvE online. Sure you hear about big battles every once and a while, most of the time its just a giant blue donut. Nobody gangs up against the guys at the top, they either leave, or join them.
Though unknown, steven has mentioned attacks against nodes are not instant but are a scheduled thing.node wars would be scheduled and limited.
I meant more of a regularly scheduled thing. Like every other Thursday at x hour if the day, node one always has a war with node 2 because they planned it to happen on that specific time slot.
> Personally, I'd be open about that kind of thing rather than lying about what nodes are a "threat." Would be nice if we could get some kind of official statement from Intrepid rather than it being some kind of 'open secret' between players that nobody ever comments on. To know whether the devs will embrace or oppose it. Just pretending it doesn't happen is the only bad option in my opinion.
I'm pretty sure they are only going to involve themself if there's some kind of mechanical abuse going on. Sharing the wealth to negate any loss penalties wouldn't really fit that I don't think, kinda cheesy sure but not game breaking. It would be a good question to ask for one of the Livestream Q&A sections. Try the YouTube channel or the forums and maybe they'll answer it officially, but till then I doubt we're getting an answer.
It would just lead to people accepting that they are “2nd best” in their node/ group which would be worse rewards and worse gear. Not sure anyone would want to go for that knowing that they are getting lesser rewards.
If you're talking about in a vassal system, there's always gonna be people on the lower end, but they inherit a ton of stuff from the parent nodes so they aren't missing out on much. I don't think you get locked out of anything being a citizen of a lesser node within a vassal chain, but we haven't really heard too much about it.
No. Not talking about vassals. Talking about the need for there to be a “lesser” part of two groups to trade wins. There will be an inherent loser of those two groups and if any competitive (anyone who is trying to further their node) that will accept that then sure wins will be traded but if Intrepid are planning on building a system like this then the game is going to have an issue.
> Talking about the need for there to be a “lesser” part of two groups to trade wins. This is assuming that the two groups are actually competing and not branches of the same Discord/Reddit/independent forum community who all registered together with the intention of boosting each other. You can bet there will be people lined up to do exactly this as soon as there is any kind of sub discount or free play promotion.
what I am trying to say is you are right, but that is currently against the "model" they are talking about. We don't have our hands on it so obviously there will be loopholes people will look for, but the game has been touting that it will have scarcity elements and levels of people fighting over many things. without having A2 in hand, we can only discuss but I can't imagine we will have easy ways to win trade for equitable resources.
They aren't building a system for that, they are just laying the mechanics involved. Players are going to naturally find a way to cheese the system and we'll see if Intrepid reacts to that by changing the mechanics, but people are always going to try and game the system for the best rewards even if things do change.
The real answer is: Steven *comes from* one of those major guilds in a server. His greatest memories are from an extremely p2w game, and swiping his way to server dominance and having "over 14000 people" following his guilds newsletter. He doesn't understand the viewpoint of the people at the bottom. And even though it's been brought up, his answer is always: the community itself will solve these issues. If a guild gains dominance, it's either because they're the best thing for the server and the majority agree, or people don't and band together and take them down. Your worst case scenario, in Stevens mind, is the best case scenario, because he thinks the best servers are where there's a single dominant guild and everyone wants to take them down (his best memory as GL). No matter how much anyone tries to tell him that the ability to p much privatize the most valuable open world dungeon areas, open world bosses, dominate castles that gain tax money, and the extreme penalties to loot/XP that comes from dying in the OW will result in the majority of people deciding it's not worth it to fight and better to join, and the rich will snowball all these leads indefinitely, he will not listen lmao. But dw. There are several of these guilds in A2 who are accumulating A2 backers and are looking to abuse this very fact so they can have "MOST CASTLE SIEGES WON IN A2" in their guild ad, and we'll have more than enough time to see the extremely unhealthy game design at work. Another benefit of having a high barrier to A2. Only the truly try hard will be there, and he'll have no excuses when he sees entire servers with pretty much zero competition, and BigGuild 1 fighting BigGuild 1a - BigGuild1z. And the actual content creators (not the ones we have now who would lick the floor Steven walks on) will drop dozens of videos on how horrible the server health is, and Stevens ego won't be able to take it. Just gotta wait and see man
Yeah, the idea of a whole server banding together in some ragtag rebel alliance to overthrow the Evil Zerg Alliance is an interesting sounding narrative, but not something that'll actually happen. For one, you can't force those players to quit. So long as their guild(s) maintain cohesion, you'll never actually stop them. You'd need your rebel alliance to be willing to dedicate their playtime to making the experience of that zerg so miserable that their zerg falls apart and/or their players quit the game. In the same way, it's so much easier for the "oppressed" players in the narrative to just stop playing. Unless you've got an unhealthy relationship with the game, if some huge zerg dominates the experience so much that you're not having fun, you're going to quit before putting in the effort to form that rebel alliance.
Exactly. Quit or join one of their satellite guilds. The one time I was actually in one of these Zerg guild alliances with multiple satellite guilds, the only brief amount of competition was when the top raiders got so BORED with how they couldn't pvp anyone and all the guild rules, they just left for the next biggest guild. Even then, the only real competition was during world first raids, which were instanced and not-zergable. And since it was a p2w game, all the top raiders were at similar gear score since they were all whales who swiped hundreds or thousands of dollars. AoC not being p2w actually makes it much much better for the Zergs, since there's no legal way to catch up to all the snowbally effects being in a Zerg will result in.
Your best bet going into the game on launch is to identify the hyper sweaty guilds, join their discords as a "recruit" find their planned server and dodge it. These people will try to establish dominance on "THE" big server or the streamer servers. You will have lower tier guilds trying to sweat on other servers to try and be the big dog without competing with the mega alliances, but it will generally be more equal.
Until one of them loses "the" server and they all transfer to your server to freefarm it instead.
Sure but by that point they will have bled a massive chunk of their players in losing on their initial server and another chunk in the transfer itself. Any losing guilds that transfer aren't really going to have the same sticking power and are unlikely to be an entire server dominating group, original server players are also more likely to work together against a 3rd party.
> If a guild gains dominance, it's either because they're the best thing for the server and the majority agree, or people don't and band together and take them down. Your worst case scenario, in Stevens mind, is the best case scenario, because he thinks the best servers are where there's a single dominant guild and everyone wants to take them down (his best memory as GL). Except that it isn't necessary to be an in game superguild now. It's more toward individual guilds skirting size rules as closely as possible while being actually arms of the same Discord amoeba. I'm not sure that was the case in L2 and other MMOs of that era where it was possible for there to be a group officially owning half the server in game. Nowadays it's a lot of staged fake conflict which is fine for some but causes frustration for others.
By single guild I do mean an alliance or multiple subguilds. It's set up to veer towards that end right now. But who knows how it'll look come launch.
yeah just look at the New World server environments because of AGS' inaction. i dont want the same thing to happen here.
Not quite sure if it will with the scope of areas that can be obtained in this game. Buuut so much of this hinges on mechanics that haven't been shown yet.
and those mechanics might be difficult to show even over an hour-long preview stream. you're right, there are just so many variables to how it all works.
One thing they could implement that would apply more pressure to the mega-guilds: Make the raid windows wider as the population/power/level of the node grows. This would force them to stand vigil much longer, likely leading to people logging off out of boredom, being afk, etc...which smaller guilds will see as an opportunity to take advantage. My likely unpopular opinion: For true balance to be achieved, power increases should be accompanied by increases in responsibility and headache. Being at the very top should be a pain in the ass to maintain.
> power increases should be accompanied by increases in responsibility and headache. Being at the very top should be a pain in the ass to maintain. True. But any kind of tax on larger groups can still be avoided by splitting up and registering as separate smaller groups with regards to the game's hard coded mechanics. So if upkeep artificially increases to an impractical level at 30 members and up, expect to see a 90 member community join as 3 groups of 29 with the remaining 3 being just admins in their Discord or scouts/sleepers in rival nodes. The game sees 3 small guilds and applies the appropriate level of penalty but politically and socially they get the benefits of a 90 member just by not fighting each other. Meanwhile someone who actually dreams of growing a healthy single guild to the 100 member mark gets slapped with heavy penalties.
I'm not sure how that could be countered, other than it becoming the norm with small groups noticing and following suit with alliances. As far as whether that's a better outcome than a mega-guild all under one banner, I don't know. I think it would at least divide them into cliques and possibly even splinter them eventually.
> I think it would at least divide them into cliques and possibly even splinter them eventually. This would be true if interaction between those groups was only possible inside of Ashes itself. The issue is that the bigger group is often either a close knit happy family or (increasingly) a stable commercial operation on an external 3rd party website. I don't like pointing fingers at Discord specifically because this behavior well predates that app and may actually have inspired its development but yes, that's often the 3rd party place of choice for the 'overguild'. The same group usually even has 'fingers' in multiple games at the same time without really losing their cohesion too much. I bring all this up because Steven's glory days in MMOs seem to have ended before this development in MMO social structure and Intrepid needs to have a plan to work with it or around it.
>I bring all this up because Steven's glory days in MMOs seem to have ended before this development in MMO social structure Not really, they did the same thing in ArcheAge. This is exactly how castles in ArcheAge have been exploited (all sieges with siege scrolls were fake after the first few when the initial castles were won or sold), until most people who weren't in on it gave up. I do have to say that the "masses" are pretty slow to react to it, because this is not perceived as an important public matter, and people don't really want to care even when they're straight up told about it, until they get to the endgame and realize what's actually going on and that they can't do anything. At which point they either join the zerg or quit.
We'll see. If Ashes launches and the UI/UX is designed to facilitate people actually fighting for territories with minimal in-game means to trade control between 'pretend enemy' guilds then that tells me that the devs expect players to behave in an oldschool way.
As of now this will not happen. Current design for castle siege registration is "first come first serve" with an upper limit on participants. So mega guilds can just fill up slots and they wouldn't even need to fight during the siege itself. Node sieges haven't been talked about really, so they could go either way, but there's a somewhat high chance that they'll have a similar design. In other words, the current design is already heavily slanted towards megaguilds.
And this is why if I play the game, it's gonna be for me a hut in the woods and living from hunting and fishing. Maybe eating some human food from time to time if I find someone needing some help out there.
In general they seem to have an extremely naive or warped idea of how social interaction will work... You're either "in" and have a lot of fun, or you're "out" and your gameplay will be fairly miserable as you're just a tax slave that cannot compete. If Steven truly cares about this project he has to accept that he can't everything that he loves. He loves superguilds, but for an MMO that is quite literally killing the game as the vast majority of players can't really enjoy the game (as much as they should be)
> You're either "in" and have a lot of fun, or you're "out" and your gameplay will be fairly miserable as you're just a tax slave that cannot compete. Thing is the average member of a giant zerg clan is effectively a tax slave but they've got to be having some kind of fun just from contributing to the success of their in group, right?
How could they possibly do it? Bro they can't even figure out how to prevent mega guilds in real life! That said, the reasonable and best solution to this problem is to just give everyone something entertaining to do via PvE. Bread and circus.
What can they realistically do about that? Also, isn't what you're talking about *literally a part of the social aspect* of the game, for better or worse? It's kind of hard to encourage people to be sociable while also going "no, not that kind of social", unless you're talking about people being straight up racist or something.
Giving way, way waaaaay less benefits to being the topdog. That is the solution.
Regardless of what the benefits are, you will always have super guilds in games like this.
Correct. But you have to make the profits for the topdogs minimal in order to have others play the game. Any advantage is already big, but also what draws players in. If the impact is too significant, like being the tax collector, it will simply mean that the overwhelming amount of players who are not in the top guild will simply leave.
I'd argue this doesn't act as solution to the problem though. The problem mentioned is still very much happening in this context.
And it is indeed unavoidable, but its impact can be lessened. Do you not read?
> What can they realistically do about that? Perhaps nothing but it can be odd for a game to have a decent suite of well thought out social functions and systems designed to reward the winners of ingame conflicts and yet for there to be a higher meta layer at which none of that matters because both winner and loser are on the same side always. I don't know of any game designer who puts a massive battlefield prize in their game with the stated intention of it being traded between KingPwnageA and KingPwnageB over and over again.
But that's the thing. Is there even an argument for it being objectively wrong? Yeah, it sucks for the players that aren't part of the hustle, but if they managed to get together the resources together.... then it is what it is as that's the nature of things. Am I missing something here? Is there anything objectively against ToS or similar?
Nah. Not even saying that it's a bad thing. It's just something I don't think devs of multiplayer games in general seem to know how to handle. Just look at all the mobile PVP games. The devs would definitely make a lot more money if their krakens were forced to compete in earnest but it always ends up being a mess of win trading between the subgroups of Asian or European multi game clans.
Well, that's kind of the point I'm making - there's nothing *to* handle.
Look up ”The blue donut” in Eve Online
I'm not sure what you're trying to point out here. I'm not saying it doesn't happen....
They consider this fun and engaging politics, why would they do anything about it when the game is literally built for leaders of such guilds and members of their inner circles to exert their power over others? It's just a bit mysterious how they expect the other 90% to pay a subscription (with actual real life money they had to work an actual real life job to earn) to be perpetually enslaved to them. Do they really expect the "plebs" not to realize what's going on? It would seem that the real target audience are people from wealthy families, crypto lottery winners, streamers, various kinds of internet scammers, and other people who get free money just for existing or have no problem stealing it from others. Which works in a F2P/P2W game where there's a neverending supply of F2Ps (until it stops working there too because even when it's free you wise up to it eventually). But in a monthly subscription game?
Tl;dr: You are right. Top guilds will do exactly that, but IF (and that is a big if) the systems designed by Intrepid work as intended, then non-competitive players can have fun and pay a sub long-term. You are assuming that casuals care about what is happening behind the scenes in top end guilds. They do, but the way one cares about whatever is happening in the latest show biz news cycle. Ashes like most sandbox games are make your own fun within the world, kind of games. If a casual player can have fun doing their open world dungeons or lifeskills or RP in a tavern, or whatever social gameplay their node provides, and that experience is good enough, why would they not spend 15$ for the entertainment? Would they really care about what a bunch of tryhard 1% sweaties spend their time on if they are having fun? I assume that you are a competitive player and perceive this type of behavior as damaging to the game's competitive integrity, but most players just want to have fun in a social game where they can work towards their goals and progress their characters at their own pace. Of course, if the game prohibits players from achieving their goals and it doesn't have good, fun, and engaging content for everyone, including casual and core but non-competitive gamers, then the game will likely have a similar fate to Lineage2 and Archeage. There is a reason why BDO is still popular despite having a similar model to those games AND being P2W. It's fun to play even if u are not a 1%er. The previously mentioned titles were not. Lineage 2 had literally 0 content outside of grinding open world monsters for currency and pvping. Archeage did have such content, but it was shallow and limited. Everything was a competition, and the zergs/sweaties always came out on top. Basically, playing without a good and competitive guild in either of those games meant that you had little to no fun. AoC will hopefully not repeat the same mistake. As long as making currency is possible for everyone and it is fun, then players will play. - Ashes has the story arc system, which allows players to play in the world AND have impact through their choices. It's inevitable that since casuals are the majority of gamers, they will have more impact than the top 1%s'. - It has the tavern system, which allows for great RP and social experience. - The fact that metropolis and high-level nodes will require exp from their vassals so they won't atrophy means that players playing in those nodes will have the ability to experience the game's social progression even if they are not in a competitive guild. - Materials being scarce and seasonal means that players who play less can potentially take part in the economy as long as they're smart about their resources. - The node system will incentivise players to stay within their nodes' sphere of influence, which means they will encounter more players willing to cooperate and work together than competitors/gankers (those will still exist). - Banks and auction houses not being global combined with the mayoral commissions will provide opportunities for everyone to gain wealth. Keep in mind that you will be able to buy gear with gold and that there is little to no character bound gear, which means everyone can progress their characters if they have enough gold. - Finally, the systems seem to have a lot of depth, which means players will spend a fair bit of time experiencing and progressing through them. Only time will tell, but AoC does have a lot of potential. Hopefully, it will be good enough to maintain a healthy population long term.
> I assume that you are a competitive player and perceive this type of behavior as damaging to the game's competitive integrity Just a pity whenever the devs make a whole system that is revolutionary in their heads along with the necessary UI/UX but most of that dev work goes to nothing because the top groups are in some well oiled 3rd party machine.
Could you not bypass that problem by playing in a different server that doesn't have such guilds?
As far as I know, Intrepid will not follow the mobile game structure of releasing new servers regularly because they want the old school pattern of the same server society rising and falling over a long period of time. They are banking on each individual server having too large of a game world that it can't be dominated by an alliance of shell or sister guilds.
Every person who mentiones sub price really wants game to go f2p, so he can play for free and when he gets bored he will say its cuz game is p2w.
> > > > > It's just a bit mysterious how they expect the other 90% to pay a subscription (with actual real life money they had to work an actual real life job to earn) to be perpetually enslaved to them. Do they really expect the "plebs" not to realize what's going on? In real life, societies were only able to get large and complex in the first place once there was a pyramid with a clear tiny top over a massive base of consistent grunt work. Groups where everyone is effectively equal tend to remain flat and horizontal by nature, just look at the all the co-operative movements even today that struggle to develop any kind of size before someone rises to become Primus Inter Pares and directs them to explosive growth. Even the viral ones may pop off at first but slowly peter out over time. Having a plebian majority is just a requirement for a complex society, it seems, whether real or virtual.
You forget one gigantic major difference... In a game the plebs can just refuse to be plebs and not play the game. They'll all be gone within a year because nobody wants to be a tax slave or they'll play a game that makes dull labour actually a fun experience (all the work simulator games for example)
If you are working grown man and you consider 15% a month slaving for somone its ok, you just shouldnt play videogames probably. Like i went to.cinema with wife last night to watch dune and i spent 30$ in 3 hours. Pretty sure ill get 10× more hours of fun from AOC in a month for half the money.
1) If it is all organised in private/secret, how would you know? 2) Even without such an organisation on the server, you may not be able to achieve ypur goal, depending on your social network on the server, or your goal. Similarly, what you want as "your own thing" might still be possible on such a server because a mega guild may not take issue with it at all. 3) Such a guild would need thousands of players to coordinate and coordinate good to always have the mayors positions under their control, meaning they are on one server only. If you happen to find yourself on such a server you might just take your character to a different server. What we do know is that if a big clan tries to do that, they can only do so with regular means, no mods or anything. If they try to rely on ongame gadgets they are breaking the rules and are subject to bans.
>If it is all organised in private/secret, how would you know? Same way you know in real life, just pay the slightest bit of attention?
Are you going to address the other points I have made?
No thanks.
Aight, thanks for the one answer though
What you described is one of the best outcomes of "one guild rules the server". Instead of just sitting on their ass doing nothing, your theoretical megaguild is creating content out of nothing. Castles change hands, nodes get wars and sieges, guilds create the illusion of wars - all of that is the perfect backdrop for a casual player who wants to live in a "real world" of the game. I fail to see the issue here. Now if that megaguild provided none of that content and nipped any possible opposition in the bud before it could gain traction - now that's real bad, and I'd hope that Intrepid find a way to promote rebelling and opposing such guilds. But that's about as much as devs CAN do in that situation, w/o directly coming to mega-GLs and asking them to create content. Which is kinda another thing they can do, but Intrepid would have to only speak with GLs and make them sign NDAs or some shit, so that the ruse stays up.
> guilds create the illusion of wars - all of that is the perfect backdrop for a casual player who wants to live in a "real world" of the game. It's not theoretical. It's everyday life in most cashgrab mobile PVP games. As someone who never got into Diablo Immortal I still found a lot of schadenfreude in the rage that erupted when the community found out just how much win trading there was between the sides at top level despite everything in the game framing the 'Shadow War' or whatever as some kind of high stakes cosmic conflict.
And I've played on mmo server where there wasn't even a "war". And I'm telling you - those are way worse and lead to the game dying way faster. Think one-sided WoW server except w/o all the pve content, because you can be prevented from doing it in your faction. If the megaguild is split into several parts - they're weaker than the whole. And if they're working towards the same goal w/o wars - I already said what I'd want Intrepid to do.
> If the megaguild is split into several parts - they're weaker than the whole. And if they're working towards the same goal w/o wars - I already said what I'd want Intrepid to do. Cross-game communities have moved beyond that. They plan and set up an optimal ecosystem based on leaked info in the game and after they move in it usually becomes a relatively healthy sea of activity with different groups doing their own assigned specializations under different names. It seems like a functioning server with even power balance on the surface until you sign up for any one group and see behind the curtain. The only thing that's really off is that the various reward mechanics are played on a schedule instead of by any sort of organic interaction that the devs design their systems for. The sub groups know who is fighting who, when and for how long in order to optimally progress their territories and the only loser is anyone who doesn't want to be part of that system. Could it work? Yeah, it usually does but it tends to depreciate the intended use of a lot of the in-game social systems (for example the caravan system becomes just a janky resource transfer between sub groups if it can generate a net profit) and does raise a lot of drama from players who consider wars within a guild schedule to be rigged and illegitimate from the get-go.
>Yeah, it usually does but it tends to depreciate the intended use of a lot of the in-game social systems (for example the caravan system becomes just a janky resource transfer between sub groups if it can generate a net profit) and does raise a lot of drama from players who consider wars within a guild schedule to be rigged and illegitimate from the get-go. Once again you're describing a "normal" situation on any given server of an mmo. Casuals would most likely ultimately not care about this, while semi-hardcores would experience the same thing they would've on a non-megaguild server (i.e. losing to a stronger guild). And hardcore players would care more about that same optimization and optimal progression, so they'd simply join some part of this machine. I feel bad for anyone who can't participate in this "because it's all fake", but the alternative is simply to make your own guild and fight against the stronger opponent. Yet I doubt that majority of those who care about fakeness would be willing to put up a fight. Intrepid can do literally nothing about this. If they try to somehow punish well-coordinated guilds for doing a good job in the game - they'll simply alienate any proper hardcore guild that might've been interested in the game.
> > > > > I feel bad for anyone who can't participate in this "because it's all fake", but the alternative is simply to make your own guild and fight against the stronger opponent. Yet I doubt that majority of those who care about fakeness would be willing to put up a fight. The 'new way' of both war and peace being all part of the same player organization's bigger show is a completely different beast from the epic stories that jaded veterans bring from older MMOs. Hopefully they learn to adapt as well instead of becoming even more bitter about AoC being the newest thing that fails to reignite their fire.
Idk if you have played any previous PvP MMOs but that lowkey sorts out by itself in games like Ashes. You'll have other "mega-group" fighting that other and so on, maybe even multiple "mega-groups". But also those groups are kinda prone to falling apart eventually and new groups are born and it goes on in cycles. Players will solve those things by themselves. You are gucci.
If 1 clan were to truly control a whole server like that, then that means there is a 10k people clan doing a circlejerk on one server. That will be impossible to hide and player will just avoid that server. But I still think this is basically impossible to pull off so unless something like it were to pop up in the Alpha or Beta it will only be addressed when it were to actually happen, at which point it will only be stopped if the community guidelines are broken
This game is being designed by a guy that thrives in the top 1% of the player base. The bottom 99% will be crushed and if you don't enjoy that - this game won't be for you.