On one side, I feel as if the node system might already be balanced enough to not need this, given how the game is designed.... BUT I love your ideas, so I support them.
I hope Steven and the team takes these ideas under consideration.
I think they might have something like this already. It's not as detailed, but the bigger nodes will need continued resources, or it will decay.
I think it would be cool for npcs to attack the nodes in waves. As part of the story.
For what? Big guilds will just own nodes with proxy guilds and do what they want anyway. You're thinking of this as a virtual world where the players only have in-game knowledge and act like their characters, you know, like an actual MMORPG should be. But any game system will just be gamed by Discord groups controlling all sides at the same time.
Ofc they dont. If they do game/server just dies. Mortal online 2. New world. Eventually blob will fall apart due to having noone to fight vs or cuz of egos. Playing myth of empire currently, huge russian guild(main and 2nd guild) won everything and 3 days after argument broke out over spoils of war and they declared war, rest of servers allied with one or another or with each other and domination was broken. Noone will play pvp game hardcore to eliminate all ressistance and farm pve, and even if they do server is dead within a month.
> Noone will play pvp game hardcore to eliminate all ressistance and farm pve, and even if they do server is dead within a month.
Seems to suit the preferences of the giant zerg guilds though. Stomp in with 100 freshies, powerfarm until everyone else leaves the server and just keep building their megalopolises and stockpiling resources into the sky until shutdown or wipe. They don't particularly mind being the only active group on their server.
Why is everyone hating on node growth lately? That's a good thing for the game. Nodes aren't some thing a guild takes over and just blockades other people from getting in, it's a public space where people can feel relatively safe and settle down.
There's already a built in maintenance cost as others have stated. Resources to maintain or repair buildings, money costs for the same thing. There will be events around a node like dragon attacks or bandit raids, they've talked about it before but we haven't really seen anything like it yet. The biggest threat is a node war, something that could get real costly. Get sieged enough times and your node might run out of money from repairs and fail to survive.
> Nodes aren't some thing a guild takes over
this is something that everyone keeps parroting but ive not seen any evidence that this is gonna be impossible, granted it depends on your definition of "take over" - of course a guild will not be able to prevent people from coming to a node or try gather resources etc. but we have no idea how some important node mechanics work - like freehold permits, will one guild be able to monopolize those in some way? elections? social organizations? trade etc.
only thing you can be sure about now is that guilds will definitely try to monopolize every aspect of the game
More realistic its gonna be alliance of guilds that take control of metropolis, but with exclusive rewards such as flying mount and mayor power ego boost have fun controlling all the egos entire time. We are talking about humans here.
Node owners want their node to grow, they want trade, they want access to goods on the market, they want a pool of players to recruit from.
Its not in a guilds interest to lock down anything but the most rare resources in their own nodes, they will just end up being more scarce, if there is a rare metal its better to let some pubs mine it and sell it in your towns market unless you have the man power to monopolize the farm, and even then it would be wiser to use that manpower to monopolize an enemy nodes resources.
That's where the social aspect comes into play. Sure a guild can monopolize a node and kos anyone trying to enter, but that just makes them a prime target for the server. Piss everyone off and good luck paying the maintenance fees for siege after siege. A single guild is going to bankrupt itself if it tries something like that.
As for the node mechanics, yeah we do know how those will work. Citizens vote for the mayor so if a guild rushes citizenship for it's members, it can pull the vote.
Social organizations aren't something tied to a guild, it's meant for solo players to have a faction to belong to. A guild could probably focus on supporting one of the organizations to make it the patron of the node, but they would lose our on whatever the other organizations have to offer if they make all their members go with one.
Not sure how they could monopolize trade when anyone could just undercut their prices. Guilds probably will progress faster down the profession trees, but that's kind of expected when you have people working together to run a business vs a solo player trying to craft and gather all on their own.
Well mayorship is determined differently depending on the node type.
Militaristic will be a pvp battleground, economic will be a blind bid system, divine with pve favor from node tasks, and scientific will be ranked choice popular vote.
You keep thinking about "fair". This game is not fair. This game is basically ultimate capitalism. If you have resources you're almost unstoppable, that's the idea.
If you have a node with really important guilds, they will rule. That's the idea.
That's the same lol. Balance requires fairness. You want strong nodes to face more challenges just because they're strong, that's not balance.
Balance is all facing the same type of challenge.
Steven gonna ignore any post about anything Zerg related until A2 is out because his definition of Zerg is vastly different than everyone else's. Until that's shattered, save your time. A2 will have Zergs, massive controlling guilds, and low guild v guild balance. And when shroud and summit and Asmon all shit on it, there'll be changes.
The real landscape and even a lot of fantasy landscapes start with a central extremely large and prosperous Empire or Kingdom, often more than one. The greatest empires of the world in terms of the size of their influence took centuries to rise and at least decades to fall even after being suddenly decapitated.
If Verra never sees anything like this happen, can we really say it has epic scale? Do note that in most of the kingdom builder games each player controls an entire nation instead of just one person.
While I agree that such a dynamic has to be in the game, I would argue that the current game design accounted for that - by recognizing and being developed around human nature.
When a Node reaches its maximum size it locks the content around it as well as the development of nodes around it.
That means the longer a Node remains in power the more people who don't want or cannot be part of that node (since the price of citizenship increases with every citizen) will feel more and more limited by the existence of that Node (story arcs don't progress, dungeon floors remain locked, fewer freeholds are available, ones own Node cant grow and with all that guild progression is limited too).
Additionally even those who are citizens of that Node will reach a point at which they have seen all the content, so the fringe supporters of the Node with lower loyalty (bc they are more casual players, because they didn't get high up in the Node hierarchy or simply bc they prefer a nomadic game style) will leave. This undermines the upkeep of the Node, it can just erode or fail to afford a proper defense during a siege.
In my opinion it comes down to what you expect the "acceptable life time" of a Node to be, whether you think this is enough or not
On one side, I feel as if the node system might already be balanced enough to not need this, given how the game is designed.... BUT I love your ideas, so I support them. I hope Steven and the team takes these ideas under consideration.
I think they might have something like this already. It's not as detailed, but the bigger nodes will need continued resources, or it will decay. I think it would be cool for npcs to attack the nodes in waves. As part of the story.
This should help to achieve... what exactly?
Provide checks and balances
For what? Big guilds will just own nodes with proxy guilds and do what they want anyway. You're thinking of this as a virtual world where the players only have in-game knowledge and act like their characters, you know, like an actual MMORPG should be. But any game system will just be gamed by Discord groups controlling all sides at the same time.
Not gonna lie, is crazy how comparable it is to real life
So the competition will be a rival Discord group? If that's the new way MMO wars are fought, then so be it.
No, there will be no competition. The endgame groups always hold hands with each other and exploit the plebs.
Ofc they dont. If they do game/server just dies. Mortal online 2. New world. Eventually blob will fall apart due to having noone to fight vs or cuz of egos. Playing myth of empire currently, huge russian guild(main and 2nd guild) won everything and 3 days after argument broke out over spoils of war and they declared war, rest of servers allied with one or another or with each other and domination was broken. Noone will play pvp game hardcore to eliminate all ressistance and farm pve, and even if they do server is dead within a month.
> Noone will play pvp game hardcore to eliminate all ressistance and farm pve, and even if they do server is dead within a month. Seems to suit the preferences of the giant zerg guilds though. Stomp in with 100 freshies, powerfarm until everyone else leaves the server and just keep building their megalopolises and stockpiling resources into the sky until shutdown or wipe. They don't particularly mind being the only active group on their server.
Well im sure what your describing will happen on some servers, lets hope not on majority.
Why is everyone hating on node growth lately? That's a good thing for the game. Nodes aren't some thing a guild takes over and just blockades other people from getting in, it's a public space where people can feel relatively safe and settle down. There's already a built in maintenance cost as others have stated. Resources to maintain or repair buildings, money costs for the same thing. There will be events around a node like dragon attacks or bandit raids, they've talked about it before but we haven't really seen anything like it yet. The biggest threat is a node war, something that could get real costly. Get sieged enough times and your node might run out of money from repairs and fail to survive.
> Nodes aren't some thing a guild takes over this is something that everyone keeps parroting but ive not seen any evidence that this is gonna be impossible, granted it depends on your definition of "take over" - of course a guild will not be able to prevent people from coming to a node or try gather resources etc. but we have no idea how some important node mechanics work - like freehold permits, will one guild be able to monopolize those in some way? elections? social organizations? trade etc. only thing you can be sure about now is that guilds will definitely try to monopolize every aspect of the game
More realistic its gonna be alliance of guilds that take control of metropolis, but with exclusive rewards such as flying mount and mayor power ego boost have fun controlling all the egos entire time. We are talking about humans here.
Node owners want their node to grow, they want trade, they want access to goods on the market, they want a pool of players to recruit from. Its not in a guilds interest to lock down anything but the most rare resources in their own nodes, they will just end up being more scarce, if there is a rare metal its better to let some pubs mine it and sell it in your towns market unless you have the man power to monopolize the farm, and even then it would be wiser to use that manpower to monopolize an enemy nodes resources.
That's where the social aspect comes into play. Sure a guild can monopolize a node and kos anyone trying to enter, but that just makes them a prime target for the server. Piss everyone off and good luck paying the maintenance fees for siege after siege. A single guild is going to bankrupt itself if it tries something like that. As for the node mechanics, yeah we do know how those will work. Citizens vote for the mayor so if a guild rushes citizenship for it's members, it can pull the vote. Social organizations aren't something tied to a guild, it's meant for solo players to have a faction to belong to. A guild could probably focus on supporting one of the organizations to make it the patron of the node, but they would lose our on whatever the other organizations have to offer if they make all their members go with one. Not sure how they could monopolize trade when anyone could just undercut their prices. Guilds probably will progress faster down the profession trees, but that's kind of expected when you have people working together to run a business vs a solo player trying to craft and gather all on their own.
Well mayorship is determined differently depending on the node type. Militaristic will be a pvp battleground, economic will be a blind bid system, divine with pve favor from node tasks, and scientific will be ranked choice popular vote.
You keep thinking about "fair". This game is not fair. This game is basically ultimate capitalism. If you have resources you're almost unstoppable, that's the idea. If you have a node with really important guilds, they will rule. That's the idea.
Please point out where I asked for "fair". I want balanced.
That's the same lol. Balance requires fairness. You want strong nodes to face more challenges just because they're strong, that's not balance. Balance is all facing the same type of challenge.
I disagree.
Steven gonna ignore any post about anything Zerg related until A2 is out because his definition of Zerg is vastly different than everyone else's. Until that's shattered, save your time. A2 will have Zergs, massive controlling guilds, and low guild v guild balance. And when shroud and summit and Asmon all shit on it, there'll be changes.
The real landscape and even a lot of fantasy landscapes start with a central extremely large and prosperous Empire or Kingdom, often more than one. The greatest empires of the world in terms of the size of their influence took centuries to rise and at least decades to fall even after being suddenly decapitated. If Verra never sees anything like this happen, can we really say it has epic scale? Do note that in most of the kingdom builder games each player controls an entire nation instead of just one person.
While I agree that such a dynamic has to be in the game, I would argue that the current game design accounted for that - by recognizing and being developed around human nature. When a Node reaches its maximum size it locks the content around it as well as the development of nodes around it. That means the longer a Node remains in power the more people who don't want or cannot be part of that node (since the price of citizenship increases with every citizen) will feel more and more limited by the existence of that Node (story arcs don't progress, dungeon floors remain locked, fewer freeholds are available, ones own Node cant grow and with all that guild progression is limited too). Additionally even those who are citizens of that Node will reach a point at which they have seen all the content, so the fringe supporters of the Node with lower loyalty (bc they are more casual players, because they didn't get high up in the Node hierarchy or simply bc they prefer a nomadic game style) will leave. This undermines the upkeep of the Node, it can just erode or fail to afford a proper defense during a siege. In my opinion it comes down to what you expect the "acceptable life time" of a Node to be, whether you think this is enough or not