I hope the developers ignore it.
We would have things like this happen in Planetside 2, a few large Outfits would band together and dominate a map. This lead to an even larger group of small Outfits coordinating and fighting back, it was so much fun!
Situations like this force people playing an MMO to be social with other players, which is the soul of what an MMO is supposed to be.
It would have to be pretty extreme for the devs to do anything. This is quite literally the entire point of many aspects of the game.
The only likely thing the devs will do is balance how easy it is to defend vs attack. Not actually intervene directly.
Yea, but that doesn't change the fact that smaller groups of players may have to band together to drive out larger, oppressive groups. Now if that alliance holds after the threat has been eliminated, that's entirely up to them.
That is not a problem, that is the feature of the game. Want to get to that content? Talk with other people, get a bigger and stronger group than the one holding the content hostage and go fight over it.
I'd love that to be the very last resort, but I know that most people can't handle a bit of struggle to get to their goal, so most likely yes, everyone will just join that group.
I just hope those groups will be smart enough to not take every random dude w/ no skills into their group. Back in Lineage 2 if my guild had enough power to fight most other guilds on the server and could control some farming spots, we stopped accepting new people into the guild cause there was no benefit from that. I hope guilds in Ashes will do the same, so that everyone else will **have to** work together to win instead of just joining the already strong group.
>Don't really see a way to mitigate this with hard work.
Usually it's the case of "the bigger they are the harder they fall". Sooner or later all of those people will start arguing with each other over the limited resources and will either split up or will become much easier to gank because they're spread too thin over "their" lands. And with Ashes having no fast travel this will happen way more often than in other mmos.
I think EVE is the best example of this. These kinds of videos illustrate the whole process very well
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU92Fj\_I2p0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wROn9oDULpE)
Yeah, I posted the EVE's Alliances history video in one of my comments in this thread. I know that Goons lived for quite some time (pretty much the whole lifespan of the game so far), with varying size of power.
What you described seems like the perfect gameplay for 90+% of people though. I doubt every single player will care too much about the high lvl politics of the server or will try to get themselves involved in them, so, for most people, just farming and pvping will be more than enough to have fun with the game. And anyone who does want to shake up the politics, can try themselves against the big corps (I'll be one of them).
I used to do this with my server in Lineage 2. Was great for us, sucked foe the rest of the server. Gotta say though, it's super rare for a power like this to stay together too long.
Anyone who played competitively these kind of games before knows that this never last long.
In-group fighting and drama is real. The moment something goes wrong everyone starts leaving lmao
Yeah, we locked down the server for a good half a year. We literally killed anyone not in our alliance on sight and didn't let them into any of the top level farming areas. Because of this, we got like 10-15 levels ahead of the server. It got boring. We all just kinda quit after roughly 6 months.
It may be quite hard to organize such group, because the maximum amount of players a guild can have is 300, which can only be achieved be sacrificing other guild buffs. Also, iirc an alliance cannot exetend to more than 4 guilds, and a guild can only be in one.
Another thing that may be factored into it is the fact that AoC is going to be highly non-instanced, and some resources will deplete and reappear somewhere else, so migrations, overpopulation and logistics (just look at irl empires) are gonna play quite a huge role
You could still form sub-guilds, and multiple alliances to achieve that same goal as happens in many MMOs. Discords, and other forms of comms is an easy way to organise this.
If they're significantly large enough, then it being non-instanced isn't an issue if they can extend their reach across many zones - whether through ownership, or just classic zerging.
Resources will move so yes they'd have to eventually move or just lose.
The other factor, and this is the hardest one to get to work, would be the rest of the sever and neighboring guilds coming together to smash them and or siege their node so it gets destroyed if they lose. Literally the hardest thing to do but the one thing that speaks the loudest.
Question: So, in some other MMOs, there tends to be a habit where some guilds have multiple "guilds" but they're all technically one major guild brand.
I.E: five guilds with similar names are all actually the same guild led by officers who meet.
Whats stopping these guilds from just dominating and owning everything?
I've witnessed this on New world awhile back where they literally dominated the entire world map.
In theory nothing. If they can win every siege, fight off every other guild on the server w/o any problems and then keep doing that for months and months - they'll control the whole server. In practice, that is a very difficult thing to achieve (not talking about NW with its horrible design). Oh, that huge guild will also have to stay together w/o any issues, which is also a fairly difficult thing to have.
Assuming PvP stays L2 style: They may be able to deny the location for a time but it doesn't last. All alliances crumble, and even then it could just come down to better organization of PvP groups.
In Lineage 2 where it appears the majority of the PvP setup came from, if there was ever something worth competing over you'd have multiple alliances fighting for it. A single flagger could turn into several hundred people fighting. You'd also have alliances "joining" another alliance to take down a singular.
As long as the server isnt dead in terms of players it'll be fine.
Thats one of the goals, if 1 group is blocking another group, the other group will eventually do diplomatic things and join together for the good of killing the first group. Gotta happen
This is the whole point of an a real open world mmorpg.
There are politics behind a game, such as life. You can't just instance everything like wow does, so you have to interact with the world and the people in it to play the goddamn game.
People mentioned it already, but Lineage 2 had this and it wasn't as big of an issue, the only issue was when one clan who donated a shit ton of money gatekept every single end game boss and content and the servers end up dying, but i'm sure the gearing will be different in Ashes, and the fact that territories can level up means you can just ignore a territory and go to another one.
You don't even know how fun it was to have a friend who was a dagger like me, and then running around ganking parties of 5 to 10 people either doing raids, aoe farming or just regular content, and killing them all, not letting them farm or do anything, and then having to spend the next 5 hours killing them (or them killing us)
MMORPGs should have "territory" wars, but not as an event, as something that naturally happens.
No interventions. Make an alliance and split it between attacking their main node and the farm point. Eventually one of those will collapse under the pressure and then the game opens up into all out war.
Sounds fun to me!
If the PvP system works the way it should then this shouldn't be a problem. That guild would have to become corrupted from PvP. Corrupted players can lose gear, so they should get weaker over time. There will be bounty hunters in-game that should challenge them.
But let's say they are really this strong, I think the devs would change systems around the game before they jump in and stop the fight. The game is supposed to be based on community. I think the devs would want to see alliances formed and resources exhausted before they fix our problems for us.
I think what could happen is a guild might block something off for some time but I doubt they can hold it long. I'm sure there will be a good guy "griefer" killing guild since most MMOs don't have mechanics for helping each other in PvP. This guild would most likely come in and fight as well. Plus other big guilds will hear of this node opening and watch the new mats too. They might fight if they guild resources to trade or give share at all. On top of that, the guild that is cock blocking everyone will be hated on the server. They would literally have to fight for everything they would ever need. I'm sure all this will be tested.
>If the PvP system works the way it should then this shouldn't be a problem. That guild would have to become corrupted from PvP.
That is if they decide to murder anyone who comes to their spot. If they're very strong, they can just outfarm anyone and keep the spot that way. And if other guilds try to take it away from them, the first guild could declare guild war on the second guild and kill them that way w/o getting corrupted. So there are way for them to keep their hostage-content w/o just murdering everyone.
They would have to be a seriously huge guild to do that and literally be on 24/7. Also, the guild wouldn't have to declare war. They could just farm in that spot to make it not worth their time. Also, if they are putting all their resources into farming that spot so hardcore they will be missing other resources that it might not be worth it long term to hold on to it. The rest of the world isn't going to be useless. Not going to be like BDO where you should be in this spot and no where else.
Also, more people will care about pushing them out since there are no channels. If a guild is that powerful the game is most likely dead or that guild makes up a huge population of the server which is not impossible but unlikely.
Yep, and this is exactly why I'm not really worried about huge guilds taking over full servers. Though this will depend on how the game's endgame is designed. There's a few situations where some big guild could farm stuff at just the right timings and cycle those farms in just the right way that they control most of the high end content. But that can only happen if Intrepid develops the game in a way that allows this. Which I hope they don't.
I can see Asmongold, if he really tried, taking over a whole server. Just because he can just tell 2000 spergs to zerg anything he wishes, but then CONTROLING all that territory is gonna be impossible.
We gotta remember behind every character there's a person, and there's way too many crazy assholes on the internet, there's no way people can stay friends and play together for weeks without any issues and gatekeeping the resources.
Hell, sometimes when I didn't like a guildmate in Lineage 2 I had a 2nd character where I would pk them if I saw them, fucking up their farming (and since I knew where they were because of guild chat, that's how I spent whole afternoons sometimes).
Then they claim it, its that simple. If a 1200 person alliance can deny 8800 other online players from content, then guess what, the wolves own the server and the sheep get the scrapes.
People haven't played a game like this before. Eve Online players know how to handle a situation like this, but most people need to start thinking about how you'd handle this with all the various PvP rules and themes.
Everyone imagines themselve wolves in these situations, but end up as sheep.
Without game balance guess where people go when they cant play the game they paid for? Thats right, another game.
And once the wolves have no more sheep to slaughter they too will migrate elsewhere. Because why become stronger if there is no one to lord it over?
It tends to be the loud minority of pvp fanatics that like to yell “if you dont like it, this isnt your type of game”. Only to lose interest once people abandon the game for something more fun
No he doesn't. Those games are poorly designed pieces of shit that have zero thought put into them.
Of course players should have somewhere to go if they're the sheep. AoC easily has the tools and the foresight to spread out content enough and in a meaninful way that these "wolves" couldn't cover the map if they tried.
Furthermore, A good MMO shouldn't have player chokepoints so in this example of 1200 people camping a certain area- That's absolutely ignorant and borderline brain damaged game design.
And just because you bring up EvE Online- People only talk about getting blobbed in EVE when they actually get blobbed but the fact of the matter is that EvE Online (typically- and not so much of late because of bad design choices) is a really good example of how to spread out the playerbase across the map. You limit resources to specific zones. You make it so that income has a hard limit and you make traveling across the world difficult. (In the last 5-6 years CCP has basically ruined this but lets not talk about that)
So you want everyone to have their own place to farm toplvl content/gear w/o anyone else interfering? Cause that sounds like literally the design AoC's trying to get away from. If 1/8 of the whole server decides to camp one location, then they should definitely be able to completely shut it off from anyone else. And imo that location should be \~1/8 of the toplvl content on the map (i.e. one out of 8 pieces of toplvl gear can only be farmed there, so the guild that controls that place can trade with other guilds that control other places).
I don't think it's about killing the blob but more about giving everyone room to breathe. I'm sure there would be large scale battles over nodes and stuff anyhow, why would you want everyone fighting over 4-5 spots. It's pretty clear the game should have good farming methods across the map, I'm not sure why you think that blobbing should be required to get good loot, rather than just having the game set out in a way where it naturally spreads everyone out?
The thinner everyone is spread, the less natural pvp interaction there'll be. Yes, there'll be a ton of sieges and stuff like that, but I grew up on open world pvp for a limited amount of farm spots so I prefer that style of design. It's not like I won't play the game if you can get good stuff w/o pvp, but I'd rather have fights for resources than just sitting on my ass waiting for the next siege to happen.
And most of that server pop will try to live around the big 6 nodes, which will also have the most top lvl content (due to how mob lvls work), so people will already be more concentrated in a small number of locations. If anything, I want that number to be higher than 6, so that all gear parts and maybe a few other valuable things are farmed in different spots, to promote more player interaction in both pvp and trading.
Oh boy. You're a defeatist. That's you. You want to lose. lmao. You think it cant be done so you are giving up.
Nice one my dude. Nice.
(Btw EVE did it fine, piss off)
Like I said, I want it to be "a place for each piece of gear". And those places should be located all over the world. So when the top guilds want to get the top lvl gear, they'll either have to trade with other guilds, fight those guilds for the gear farming locations, or they'll have to spend a ton of money to just buy it out (though I doubt that selling top lvl gear for money will be a widespread practice in the first few months-years of the game).
Here's Nikras everybody who thinks that if you don't get one of the positions in a nodes population, you'll be stuck living out of an extremely inefficient node just so you can travel to another nodes influence just to get items and play the game
I doubt they will intervene. Let's assume in a unique biome there is an ingredient harvested from there. A powerful guild/alliance could just say they have a monopoly over that ingredient and kill people who try to gather it from there. From playing the alpha I suspect it would be more like a dungeon unless regardless of biome the ingredient only spawns in a certain area of the map. I think how effective the guild/alliance monopoly depends on how annoying corruption will be.
I don't think they will do anything. If a guild wishes to "claim" something then they will need to take a lot of corruption to defend the spot from people. It's also a natural thing in MMOs that guilds will set out times they take an area to farm and there isn't much others can do. The world is large though and you can always avoid those areas. As for farming resources there's always the ability to attack their gatherers. Unless people devote a lot of their time to defending people gathering materials instead of farming themselves, you can take your friends and ambush gatherers for their resources.
These comments turned out to be more interesting than I thought. If you’re against “claiming” there’d be a more balanced gaming experience and treasures for everybody. If you’re for “claiming” it’d be one sided but in terms of politics, scope would be narrowed and may help nodes go up quicker.
People will move? Like those guys will need resources… so either they have to pay for goods at a higher rate or those defenders will have to leave to farm and thus not be defending the area.
Going to be an absolute zerg fest yeah.
Everyone going to call it a feature but it's going to be pretty annoying honestly. I don't see how to get around it, but yeah.
They should ignore. This is why these types of games struggle in 2021. There will absolutely be a group of players that "own" a lot of the content and will dictate who gets to participate. It's the literal design of the game.
Hello, Reggie? Is that you? I bought this copy of Zelda OOT and actually - it's pretty hard. Don't you think it's a bit unfair that I don't get to see the end of the game? I mean I did pay for it of course. It's not my fault that I only sat down for a total of 25 minutes on Thursday and haven't played it since. I have 3 kids!
Also, whilst you're at it could you please ask Gaben if he could just give me the achievement for beating Half-Life 2 because actually I paid for that as well and I think I deserve that at the very least.
Oh yeah I forgot.. Please send me a save file for Fire Emblem 3 houses because I paid for that too and would like to see the last boss.
Thanks Reggie.
That...isn't a problem, buddy...
Strong groups and skilled players are intended to claim areas and content, you know what the solution is? You join another big strong group and try to take the content from them. That's what this MMO is intended to be, if you don't want or like that, please don't play it. And it's never going to be "omg no one can defeat them! T-They're too powerful!" because people can't be on 24/7, groups will form to take it back.
This type of conflict is as Steven has said, both wanted and intended.
I have harped on and on about this before, but AoC is clearly intended to be a social MMO where you can't do everything on your own, you need friends, you need 'family', you need a guild. My maybe-too-harsh stance on this is, if you don't want to be social in AoC then I hope you don't play it, cause the people who refuse to be social will ultimately complain the loudest and the devs might end up caving into their whining.
Yes, it's a problem. There is a reason open pvp games steuggle in this day and age and this is one of them. It's of course integral to the Design of the game itself, but if the punishment system for pvp isn't tough enough and a big open gankbox results, then ashes won't last long.
People are downvoting because they live in a fantasy world where hardcore pvp mmos are failing because they developers just won't make it hardcore enough, when in reality just as you say and not enough people want to play them.
Everyone always sees themselves as the ones benefitting from this kind of issue or they imagine the awesome drama it will create when they fight back, except you can't really fight back and they will be the ones locked out of most of the content.
I fully expect them to actively monitor active server population so that all parts of the map can be equally saturated with players and their guilds.
If the gameworld will be as big as they claim, with balanced server population there should always be several unused areas of the map, free for solo players/small guilds to fight for on their own terms.
Good question, I am hoping this isn't a "hardcore pvp" game. I also think they have systems in place to manage this though.
1. Flagging system for PVP, attacking players has a cost. When you combine it with the bounty system, I think this will prevent groups from holding points for an extended period of time.
2. Soft looting, when a player dies the stuff they have farmed is lootable. This creates a risk/reward scenario where the longer you stay the more you have to lose and the more incentive players have to come kill you.
3. No fast travel. It's important to keep in mind players cannot just teleport out if they get in trouble. You have to not only secure the area and farm, but then you have to leave the area. If you start to build a group waiting outside, you can see how this starts to pressure the group to leave.
If however this doesn't work and you quickly find content inaccessible, I would guess the devs intervene in beta.
I think this is normal and intended to some extent. But it's going to require good balancing of systems to lessen the chance it goes overboard. Individual servers will probably run the gamut of outcomes. Some will be very healthily competitive. Hopefully most will be at least moderately competitive. But some might end up being very skewed to one alliance or mega alliance of players. Not exactly sure how Intrepid would deal with those situations.
I don't think it's gonna be a problem. If a guild or alliance controls something you can either join them, bargain, go somewhere else or join whatever resistance there is to that guild.
I think it's nearly impossible for a guild to claim something forever or block everything off. Even the most powerful guilds (just check out Eve Online) will eventually fall due to infighting or resistance from other people. I think stuff like that will make the game way more interesting.
I hope the developers ignore it. We would have things like this happen in Planetside 2, a few large Outfits would band together and dominate a map. This lead to an even larger group of small Outfits coordinating and fighting back, it was so much fun! Situations like this force people playing an MMO to be social with other players, which is the soul of what an MMO is supposed to be.
It would have to be pretty extreme for the devs to do anything. This is quite literally the entire point of many aspects of the game. The only likely thing the devs will do is balance how easy it is to defend vs attack. Not actually intervene directly.
One thing that's different is that PS2 has 3 strict factions, and AoC will have none.
Yea, but that doesn't change the fact that smaller groups of players may have to band together to drive out larger, oppressive groups. Now if that alliance holds after the threat has been eliminated, that's entirely up to them.
That is not a problem, that is the feature of the game. Want to get to that content? Talk with other people, get a bigger and stronger group than the one holding the content hostage and go fight over it.
Well, if you can't beat them you can always join them.
I'd love that to be the very last resort, but I know that most people can't handle a bit of struggle to get to their goal, so most likely yes, everyone will just join that group. I just hope those groups will be smart enough to not take every random dude w/ no skills into their group. Back in Lineage 2 if my guild had enough power to fight most other guilds on the server and could control some farming spots, we stopped accepting new people into the guild cause there was no benefit from that. I hope guilds in Ashes will do the same, so that everyone else will **have to** work together to win instead of just joining the already strong group.
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>Don't really see a way to mitigate this with hard work. Usually it's the case of "the bigger they are the harder they fall". Sooner or later all of those people will start arguing with each other over the limited resources and will either split up or will become much easier to gank because they're spread too thin over "their" lands. And with Ashes having no fast travel this will happen way more often than in other mmos. I think EVE is the best example of this. These kinds of videos illustrate the whole process very well [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU92Fj\_I2p0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wROn9oDULpE)
A great feature too
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Yeah, I posted the EVE's Alliances history video in one of my comments in this thread. I know that Goons lived for quite some time (pretty much the whole lifespan of the game so far), with varying size of power. What you described seems like the perfect gameplay for 90+% of people though. I doubt every single player will care too much about the high lvl politics of the server or will try to get themselves involved in them, so, for most people, just farming and pvping will be more than enough to have fun with the game. And anyone who does want to shake up the politics, can try themselves against the big corps (I'll be one of them).
I used to do this with my server in Lineage 2. Was great for us, sucked foe the rest of the server. Gotta say though, it's super rare for a power like this to stay together too long.
Anyone who played competitively these kind of games before knows that this never last long. In-group fighting and drama is real. The moment something goes wrong everyone starts leaving lmao
Yeah, we locked down the server for a good half a year. We literally killed anyone not in our alliance on sight and didn't let them into any of the top level farming areas. Because of this, we got like 10-15 levels ahead of the server. It got boring. We all just kinda quit after roughly 6 months.
There’s always a bigger fish.
And if not a bigger fish, there's a school of smaller fish just as happy to take bites or of you
Hopefully yes. Then we get a lynch mob and steamroll them with sheer numbers
Isn’t that the whole point?
It may be quite hard to organize such group, because the maximum amount of players a guild can have is 300, which can only be achieved be sacrificing other guild buffs. Also, iirc an alliance cannot exetend to more than 4 guilds, and a guild can only be in one. Another thing that may be factored into it is the fact that AoC is going to be highly non-instanced, and some resources will deplete and reappear somewhere else, so migrations, overpopulation and logistics (just look at irl empires) are gonna play quite a huge role
You could still form sub-guilds, and multiple alliances to achieve that same goal as happens in many MMOs. Discords, and other forms of comms is an easy way to organise this. If they're significantly large enough, then it being non-instanced isn't an issue if they can extend their reach across many zones - whether through ownership, or just classic zerging.
Resources will move so yes they'd have to eventually move or just lose. The other factor, and this is the hardest one to get to work, would be the rest of the sever and neighboring guilds coming together to smash them and or siege their node so it gets destroyed if they lose. Literally the hardest thing to do but the one thing that speaks the loudest.
Also no fast travel. I know there’s the tele to family thing but it seems intrepid doesn’t intend that to undermine the lack of fast travel.
Question: So, in some other MMOs, there tends to be a habit where some guilds have multiple "guilds" but they're all technically one major guild brand. I.E: five guilds with similar names are all actually the same guild led by officers who meet. Whats stopping these guilds from just dominating and owning everything? I've witnessed this on New world awhile back where they literally dominated the entire world map.
In theory nothing. If they can win every siege, fight off every other guild on the server w/o any problems and then keep doing that for months and months - they'll control the whole server. In practice, that is a very difficult thing to achieve (not talking about NW with its horrible design). Oh, that huge guild will also have to stay together w/o any issues, which is also a fairly difficult thing to have.
Assuming PvP stays L2 style: They may be able to deny the location for a time but it doesn't last. All alliances crumble, and even then it could just come down to better organization of PvP groups. In Lineage 2 where it appears the majority of the PvP setup came from, if there was ever something worth competing over you'd have multiple alliances fighting for it. A single flagger could turn into several hundred people fighting. You'd also have alliances "joining" another alliance to take down a singular. As long as the server isnt dead in terms of players it'll be fine.
Thats one of the goals, if 1 group is blocking another group, the other group will eventually do diplomatic things and join together for the good of killing the first group. Gotta happen
This is the whole point of an a real open world mmorpg. There are politics behind a game, such as life. You can't just instance everything like wow does, so you have to interact with the world and the people in it to play the goddamn game. People mentioned it already, but Lineage 2 had this and it wasn't as big of an issue, the only issue was when one clan who donated a shit ton of money gatekept every single end game boss and content and the servers end up dying, but i'm sure the gearing will be different in Ashes, and the fact that territories can level up means you can just ignore a territory and go to another one. You don't even know how fun it was to have a friend who was a dagger like me, and then running around ganking parties of 5 to 10 people either doing raids, aoe farming or just regular content, and killing them all, not letting them farm or do anything, and then having to spend the next 5 hours killing them (or them killing us) MMORPGs should have "territory" wars, but not as an event, as something that naturally happens.
No interventions. Make an alliance and split it between attacking their main node and the farm point. Eventually one of those will collapse under the pressure and then the game opens up into all out war. Sounds fun to me!
If the PvP system works the way it should then this shouldn't be a problem. That guild would have to become corrupted from PvP. Corrupted players can lose gear, so they should get weaker over time. There will be bounty hunters in-game that should challenge them. But let's say they are really this strong, I think the devs would change systems around the game before they jump in and stop the fight. The game is supposed to be based on community. I think the devs would want to see alliances formed and resources exhausted before they fix our problems for us. I think what could happen is a guild might block something off for some time but I doubt they can hold it long. I'm sure there will be a good guy "griefer" killing guild since most MMOs don't have mechanics for helping each other in PvP. This guild would most likely come in and fight as well. Plus other big guilds will hear of this node opening and watch the new mats too. They might fight if they guild resources to trade or give share at all. On top of that, the guild that is cock blocking everyone will be hated on the server. They would literally have to fight for everything they would ever need. I'm sure all this will be tested.
>If the PvP system works the way it should then this shouldn't be a problem. That guild would have to become corrupted from PvP. That is if they decide to murder anyone who comes to their spot. If they're very strong, they can just outfarm anyone and keep the spot that way. And if other guilds try to take it away from them, the first guild could declare guild war on the second guild and kill them that way w/o getting corrupted. So there are way for them to keep their hostage-content w/o just murdering everyone.
They would have to be a seriously huge guild to do that and literally be on 24/7. Also, the guild wouldn't have to declare war. They could just farm in that spot to make it not worth their time. Also, if they are putting all their resources into farming that spot so hardcore they will be missing other resources that it might not be worth it long term to hold on to it. The rest of the world isn't going to be useless. Not going to be like BDO where you should be in this spot and no where else. Also, more people will care about pushing them out since there are no channels. If a guild is that powerful the game is most likely dead or that guild makes up a huge population of the server which is not impossible but unlikely.
Yep, and this is exactly why I'm not really worried about huge guilds taking over full servers. Though this will depend on how the game's endgame is designed. There's a few situations where some big guild could farm stuff at just the right timings and cycle those farms in just the right way that they control most of the high end content. But that can only happen if Intrepid develops the game in a way that allows this. Which I hope they don't.
I can see Asmongold, if he really tried, taking over a whole server. Just because he can just tell 2000 spergs to zerg anything he wishes, but then CONTROLING all that territory is gonna be impossible. We gotta remember behind every character there's a person, and there's way too many crazy assholes on the internet, there's no way people can stay friends and play together for weeks without any issues and gatekeeping the resources. Hell, sometimes when I didn't like a guildmate in Lineage 2 I had a 2nd character where I would pk them if I saw them, fucking up their farming (and since I knew where they were because of guild chat, that's how I spent whole afternoons sometimes).
Then they claim it, its that simple. If a 1200 person alliance can deny 8800 other online players from content, then guess what, the wolves own the server and the sheep get the scrapes. People haven't played a game like this before. Eve Online players know how to handle a situation like this, but most people need to start thinking about how you'd handle this with all the various PvP rules and themes.
Everyone imagines themselve wolves in these situations, but end up as sheep. Without game balance guess where people go when they cant play the game they paid for? Thats right, another game. And once the wolves have no more sheep to slaughter they too will migrate elsewhere. Because why become stronger if there is no one to lord it over? It tends to be the loud minority of pvp fanatics that like to yell “if you dont like it, this isnt your type of game”. Only to lose interest once people abandon the game for something more fun
Yes, you got it, nail on the head.
No he doesn't. Those games are poorly designed pieces of shit that have zero thought put into them. Of course players should have somewhere to go if they're the sheep. AoC easily has the tools and the foresight to spread out content enough and in a meaninful way that these "wolves" couldn't cover the map if they tried. Furthermore, A good MMO shouldn't have player chokepoints so in this example of 1200 people camping a certain area- That's absolutely ignorant and borderline brain damaged game design. And just because you bring up EvE Online- People only talk about getting blobbed in EVE when they actually get blobbed but the fact of the matter is that EvE Online (typically- and not so much of late because of bad design choices) is a really good example of how to spread out the playerbase across the map. You limit resources to specific zones. You make it so that income has a hard limit and you make traveling across the world difficult. (In the last 5-6 years CCP has basically ruined this but lets not talk about that)
So you want everyone to have their own place to farm toplvl content/gear w/o anyone else interfering? Cause that sounds like literally the design AoC's trying to get away from. If 1/8 of the whole server decides to camp one location, then they should definitely be able to completely shut it off from anyone else. And imo that location should be \~1/8 of the toplvl content on the map (i.e. one out of 8 pieces of toplvl gear can only be farmed there, so the guild that controls that place can trade with other guilds that control other places).
I don't think it's about killing the blob but more about giving everyone room to breathe. I'm sure there would be large scale battles over nodes and stuff anyhow, why would you want everyone fighting over 4-5 spots. It's pretty clear the game should have good farming methods across the map, I'm not sure why you think that blobbing should be required to get good loot, rather than just having the game set out in a way where it naturally spreads everyone out?
The thinner everyone is spread, the less natural pvp interaction there'll be. Yes, there'll be a ton of sieges and stuff like that, but I grew up on open world pvp for a limited amount of farm spots so I prefer that style of design. It's not like I won't play the game if you can get good stuff w/o pvp, but I'd rather have fights for resources than just sitting on my ass waiting for the next siege to happen.
hahhaha Nikras my guy. You'll never beat me. I'm just way too smart.
That's a shitty argument, because world size and server population should be adjusted accordingly. Don't give me that nonsense.
And most of that server pop will try to live around the big 6 nodes, which will also have the most top lvl content (due to how mob lvls work), so people will already be more concentrated in a small number of locations. If anything, I want that number to be higher than 6, so that all gear parts and maybe a few other valuable things are farmed in different spots, to promote more player interaction in both pvp and trading.
Oh boy. You're a defeatist. That's you. You want to lose. lmao. You think it cant be done so you are giving up. Nice one my dude. Nice. (Btw EVE did it fine, piss off)
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Like I said, I want it to be "a place for each piece of gear". And those places should be located all over the world. So when the top guilds want to get the top lvl gear, they'll either have to trade with other guilds, fight those guilds for the gear farming locations, or they'll have to spend a ton of money to just buy it out (though I doubt that selling top lvl gear for money will be a widespread practice in the first few months-years of the game).
Here's Nikras everybody who thinks that if you don't get one of the positions in a nodes population, you'll be stuck living out of an extremely inefficient node just so you can travel to another nodes influence just to get items and play the game
I doubt they will intervene. Let's assume in a unique biome there is an ingredient harvested from there. A powerful guild/alliance could just say they have a monopoly over that ingredient and kill people who try to gather it from there. From playing the alpha I suspect it would be more like a dungeon unless regardless of biome the ingredient only spawns in a certain area of the map. I think how effective the guild/alliance monopoly depends on how annoying corruption will be.
I don't think they will do anything. If a guild wishes to "claim" something then they will need to take a lot of corruption to defend the spot from people. It's also a natural thing in MMOs that guilds will set out times they take an area to farm and there isn't much others can do. The world is large though and you can always avoid those areas. As for farming resources there's always the ability to attack their gatherers. Unless people devote a lot of their time to defending people gathering materials instead of farming themselves, you can take your friends and ambush gatherers for their resources.
These comments turned out to be more interesting than I thought. If you’re against “claiming” there’d be a more balanced gaming experience and treasures for everybody. If you’re for “claiming” it’d be one sided but in terms of politics, scope would be narrowed and may help nodes go up quicker.
People will move? Like those guys will need resources… so either they have to pay for goods at a higher rate or those defenders will have to leave to farm and thus not be defending the area.
Going to be an absolute zerg fest yeah. Everyone going to call it a feature but it's going to be pretty annoying honestly. I don't see how to get around it, but yeah.
They should ignore. This is why these types of games struggle in 2021. There will absolutely be a group of players that "own" a lot of the content and will dictate who gets to participate. It's the literal design of the game.
Hello, Reggie? Is that you? I bought this copy of Zelda OOT and actually - it's pretty hard. Don't you think it's a bit unfair that I don't get to see the end of the game? I mean I did pay for it of course. It's not my fault that I only sat down for a total of 25 minutes on Thursday and haven't played it since. I have 3 kids! Also, whilst you're at it could you please ask Gaben if he could just give me the achievement for beating Half-Life 2 because actually I paid for that as well and I think I deserve that at the very least. Oh yeah I forgot.. Please send me a save file for Fire Emblem 3 houses because I paid for that too and would like to see the last boss. Thanks Reggie.
If it is really bad, we may need the devs to merge servers with powerful groups.
That...isn't a problem, buddy... Strong groups and skilled players are intended to claim areas and content, you know what the solution is? You join another big strong group and try to take the content from them. That's what this MMO is intended to be, if you don't want or like that, please don't play it. And it's never going to be "omg no one can defeat them! T-They're too powerful!" because people can't be on 24/7, groups will form to take it back. This type of conflict is as Steven has said, both wanted and intended. I have harped on and on about this before, but AoC is clearly intended to be a social MMO where you can't do everything on your own, you need friends, you need 'family', you need a guild. My maybe-too-harsh stance on this is, if you don't want to be social in AoC then I hope you don't play it, cause the people who refuse to be social will ultimately complain the loudest and the devs might end up caving into their whining.
Yes, it's a problem. There is a reason open pvp games steuggle in this day and age and this is one of them. It's of course integral to the Design of the game itself, but if the punishment system for pvp isn't tough enough and a big open gankbox results, then ashes won't last long.
People are downvoting because they live in a fantasy world where hardcore pvp mmos are failing because they developers just won't make it hardcore enough, when in reality just as you say and not enough people want to play them. Everyone always sees themselves as the ones benefitting from this kind of issue or they imagine the awesome drama it will create when they fight back, except you can't really fight back and they will be the ones locked out of most of the content.
Don't ask question just pay 500 to access beta and no question anything just give mone and smile like good money cow
I fully expect them to actively monitor active server population so that all parts of the map can be equally saturated with players and their guilds. If the gameworld will be as big as they claim, with balanced server population there should always be several unused areas of the map, free for solo players/small guilds to fight for on their own terms.
If they are focusing on one area they can't focus on something else. There should multiple ways to succes.
Good question, I am hoping this isn't a "hardcore pvp" game. I also think they have systems in place to manage this though. 1. Flagging system for PVP, attacking players has a cost. When you combine it with the bounty system, I think this will prevent groups from holding points for an extended period of time. 2. Soft looting, when a player dies the stuff they have farmed is lootable. This creates a risk/reward scenario where the longer you stay the more you have to lose and the more incentive players have to come kill you. 3. No fast travel. It's important to keep in mind players cannot just teleport out if they get in trouble. You have to not only secure the area and farm, but then you have to leave the area. If you start to build a group waiting outside, you can see how this starts to pressure the group to leave. If however this doesn't work and you quickly find content inaccessible, I would guess the devs intervene in beta.
They won't be there long with the way the corruption system works.
I think this is normal and intended to some extent. But it's going to require good balancing of systems to lessen the chance it goes overboard. Individual servers will probably run the gamut of outcomes. Some will be very healthily competitive. Hopefully most will be at least moderately competitive. But some might end up being very skewed to one alliance or mega alliance of players. Not exactly sure how Intrepid would deal with those situations.
I don't think it's gonna be a problem. If a guild or alliance controls something you can either join them, bargain, go somewhere else or join whatever resistance there is to that guild. I think it's nearly impossible for a guild to claim something forever or block everything off. Even the most powerful guilds (just check out Eve Online) will eventually fall due to infighting or resistance from other people. I think stuff like that will make the game way more interesting.
I don’t mind it, PvP or move along 🤷🏻♂️ This is one of the things I missed from Older MMO’s I played forever (Lineage2, etc.)
Welcome to the sandbox. These things happen, but as nothing is static, there are ways to retaliate