I put some extra effort into this one considering i've taken a short break from streaming, i'll continue to up the quality during this week off x Come follow the stream for the return on thursday: www.twitch.tv/Narciverse
Now I'm desperate to know what you noticed. I didn't watch the showcase, but from what you said it sounded like the attacking/harassing group would just re-spawn and repeatedly attack. That seems a tad off to me, but it might be ok.
With how you attack the caravan and such there should be a breakdown of goods, hard to believe smashing and burning a caravan and the loot is still undamaged, maybe that should be part of the balancing, will also incentivize killing attackers as quickly as possible so they don't damage your loot. Doesn't fix it but just makes sense considering those caravans light on fire...
I plan on playing this game when it comes out. I haven't been excited to play a new MMO since SWTOR was released. I do have some very real concerns with the way that the node system works. Many years ago, before Discord even existed, I played Evony. It's a browser based game. Basically an MMO resource/spread sheet kind of game. In that game you can attack your neighbors. The combat was just X number enemy rolls dice against Y number of defender and whoever had the most superior troops won the outcome, and could raid your base or even conquer it completely. What's relevant here is that in response to that, players would form alliances. After the first month the entire map is sectioned off into states owned by certain guilds. Any solo player was just there for a little while, got farmed by the people in a guild, and then quit. Here's how this plays out. Guilds form alliances. Everything is good, the balance of power isn't too far out of line and then this happens: "Hey, why is player X attacking my base? I'm part of guild Y and we have an alliance" "Sorry, he doesn't know any better. I'll tell him to stop." A few hours later you find out that the guild that you had an alliance with betrayed you, joined up with your enemy, and now they destroy your guild. In theory, that's fun. It's where that leads to that concerns me. Eventually you just end up with one giant empire that bully's everyone else out of the game. Then the empire has nobody left to bully. Nobody can trust each other enough to break away from the empire and form a resistance, then the empire quits the game and the game is just dead. I mentioned that this was before the days of Discord. Now with Discord being a ubiquitous aspect of the gaming community, the ability to facilitate mass alliances and combat is so strong that I believe that this type of scenario will not only play out, but be played out quicker in Ashes of Creation. I know that what I am about to say is an impossibility but, if there was a way to limit communication to only in game, and not only in game but only face to face communication between players, it would so severely cut down the ability to mass organize and also mass betray, that groups would never turn into these giant mega empires. There would always be a back and forth battle between factions, alliances, betrayals. THAT....would be amazing! Unfortunately it would never be possible to implement and with today's ability to mass communicate I have a very strong sense that Ashes is going to have a very short life span. A great concept, that is just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rewind the clock 20 years and this concept is the pinnacle of gaming.
I choked on my drink with the enveus joke. Great video. I think we still need to test the risk factor for the attackers, I understand the social aspect of it, but systems not always play as they are designed, and less when left in hands of the players.
Yeah but the main over arching point of the game is to advance the nodes and your kingdom, not just your personal gain. So there really is less incentive to disrupt trade in your own area. This is where Ashes is so much different than other games.
Attackers should just become full lootable when they die. Maybe you could even loot some exp from them that they lose. The whole node system won't stop griefers because they're not interested in building up nodes. They want your resources for to sell for money for personal gain OR they're bots that just sell gold. And it won't be one specific pack of griefers doing it, it'll just be a constant chain of different groups going after different targets that results in you never being able to transfer your stuff. You never stay in one place, you always keep moving in PvP. You havet o make it *personally* risky to attack a Caravan on the same level that it is personally risky to move a Caravan. Another possible way to address this is if you attack a Caravan, you immediately go on a Wanted board in the area and you become an outlaw/fugitive that everyone who kills you gets a reward for doing it. And maybe you get an icon by your name that shows you're a Wanted man. This is actually why Lineage 2's karma system was revolutionary for its time. There were consequences for griefing.
I think players becoming fully lootable just means that they will never attack caravans, unless they know they always win (which just isnt fun, you want to engage in pvp where both sides could win). I do agree that there needs to be some risk to the attackers however. So maybe have them be partially lootable? Maybe one or two items. Normally wpvp in AoC will be risk vs reward since you drop mats upon death and gain corruption. But if you are attacking a caravan you wont have mats on you and you also dont gain corruption since its counted as a pvp event. The second idea i really like. But you still want people to engange in caravan pvp, so you need to be careful with a system like that so it isnt too punishing.
Agree that attackers should be lootable, and everyone involved should have a chance for items to totally break on death. If they want this to be a game where players are the economy and it actually functions well, then there will have to be item loss in some form, either through items breaking over time or being destroyed upon death.
You are underestimating the punishment of becoming hated and becoming vasseled. Basically those types of players would be on wanted boards anyways...it's just those wanted boards would be player-made. They also would end up at a disadvantage in pvp because they wouldn't have access to the same gear and buffs as the players of more advanced nodes.
What people that dont have a serious Lineage2 backround cant understand is that the game will be about groups of 8, constant parties/CPs like we call them, that are part of big guilds, but those groups of 8, will be a team that farm together, defend together, making money together, owning multiple characters etc etc. So caravans will be mostly CP content, to make money. Now about other ppl attacking etc, in lineage2, and i am reffering there, because Steve was an L2 player, said many times L2 is one of the inspirations for AoC, and actually the whole pvp system with flag and corruption if you kill some unflagged is 100% L2 system, there is this HUGE aspect that is called politics. And politics in an open world mmo with pvp like that is EVERYTHING. CPs will have toons just to pk/kill other people, perma corrupted parked in their spots, means to come and harrass you in your farming etc etc. Friendship deals, money deals, legendary bosses etc will be huge factor. So after some time, dont expect people randomly attack caravans because there will be consequences! This game is made with oldschool philosophy, for groups and socialization, open world pvp and pk, alliances and political backstabs, covered with some mambo jumbo theories to attract solo players. I know for a fact that big clans and groups from L2 are waiting for these fun days, BUT STEVEN HURRY! AS TIME PASSES WE ARE GETTING SERIOUSLY OLDER!
The most I can say is maybe. MMOs have become pop-in/drop-out because the target audience tends to be older with responsibilities now. Having a second job in a video game is not appealing in modern times.
@@cmike123 Nah, that has become so common place because there are no good new games. People are still playing wow sod after decades on the game. It’s just not that appealing. Other games are so tailored around personal gain that they lose appeal quickly. If Intrepid succeeds at building the game they intend to, it will capture the target audience and people will love it.
@@jonathanhaven1690 I'll push back by saying WoW was the first game to make MMOs bite-sized. From Dungeon/Raid Finders to quest givers having exclamations over their head. Ashes looks to be aiming at a time before all of that. I just dont think the modern gamer is up to it. Everybody rushes to end game. Taking 3 days to craft an item would be like asking to cut your own dick off. And God forbid a dungeon last 6 hours or more.
FF14 used group of 8 system and it wasn't great, it just made "clicks" of smaller group within the guild, and making any progress without a solid static was impossible. I much perfer the way FF11 was setup, where much larger groups was required and rotation of people within that large group was not outside the norm. AoC being a very open world game (not all inside closed off dungeons) I'm hoping it's not going to simply stick to a 8man static group.
I love this idea of Kingdoms vs Kingdoms. Certain nodes might be a highly contested PVP zone and the mayor has to send resources to build up defenses for that city while they war with a neighbor. On the flip side you could have two allied kingdoms that support each other incase a large scale war breaks out. Bandits from waring factions could disrupt trade routes around these contested nodes.
I love the idea of being part of a kingdom where nearly everything I do has some kind of impact on it. The first iterations will probably not work 100 % as they expect and MMO players are masters in finding exploits, so I just hope that Intrepid will quickly move on exploits once they're found and just continually work to achieve their vision, even if it costs them some popularity of sandbox MMO players.
Caravan system seems hard to balance coz if there is no risk to attackers then it's trolls and gankers 24/7, but if there is too much risk then people will just ignore them and effectively win trade deliveries. I'm also interested to see if the node system just devolves into like 10 main cities, owned by the top 10 guilds spread out far enough that they can all get lots of vassals, and they just don't attack each other coz it's more beneficial to be friends.
Hmm. I hope there is a way to turn it off. Imagine just randomly running up on one. Caravans seem cool. What are transporting. Goods. Goods to upgrade town merchants, guards, buildings? Food? Crafting mats? Okay. But when attackers kill it they get some good loot. Attackers I feel should only have like 3 trys after that they become alive spectators, they cannot attack no more. Further drop Gold for shared between the protectors, and one loot that they theyve selected in inventory (or a pop up that asked out these 3 items which will you drop). Nothing equipped though, but something above threshold of usefulness. I do feel like nodes and some caravans should have npcs. That automatically war or protect caravans. I think ppl should beable to hire out ten npcs for caravans too, maybe at a local pub or barracks. Lots of copiem. My main thing is to have summoners be actual summoners. Not just summon something as an attack. I'd like a pet or pets that stay.
I imagine this is going to be "solved" as a playstyle by keeping the info of when your moving amongst those you trust and then going on the runs when you think most of your server is asleep reducing the amount of griefers that might be on.
Yeh, or as one caravan goes, so do others, in a mass convoy survival mechanism. Or when events are occurring Not to mention, there are that many fronts to progress your character in the game, harassing caravans is going to be pretty low on most people's priorities unless there are major conflict issues in the area. But in this case, if shit is majorly going down in an area, general trade will be less, general prices will be higher, and reward for braving the risk will also be higher
Until someone makes a spreadsheet and identified your guilds off peak hours and creates a dataset to predict when your most optimal time to move a caravan is, thereby changing when the 'meta time's is for such a move and it becomes unsolved within a day or two.
I suppose it depends how scarce materials are going to be. I feel like ultimately that decions is going to be a massive factor on how aggressive caravan and node wars will be.
It would take social effort but you can run multiple caravans at the same time. It's probably realistic to organize two at once. The opaque physical caravan advancements are mentioned, but not the ability to hire NPC guards (dependent on advancements). Two groups could run 2 caravans at once, and potentially double the NPC guards. [NPCs may not be great but they won't betray you, leave, disconnect, etc...] There's no ability for bandits to hire NPC bandits. This video was a staged caravan event. The bandits knew exactly when and where to be and were mostly Rangers with camouflage. Are 30 people going to drop what they're doing and RUN ACROSS A HUGE PHYSICAL WORLD WITH NO FAST TRAVEL and no flying mounts to go gank a caravan that's already halfway to its destination to pick up some random loot bags THAT CANNOT BE SOLD at traditional vendors? The risk is wasting your time. The reward seems to be very minimal. (What you can put in your backpack, it's not an efficient use of your time.) Remember at the end of this video that literally NO ONE GOT PAID. Plus they had to sit there while a bandit caravan was summoned to take those goods. That's even MORE time wasted for the gankers. How many players want to sit around like that to gain almost nothing except the joy of griefing? Also after the fight, the bandits hang around and wait for a new caravan to arrive to cart off the spoils with NO ONE HARASSING THEM the entire time. The original caravan just gave up and never came back for revenge.
Some sort of bounty system would be interesting. Attackers needing to pay bounty for source destination targets of caravans and be blacklisted there until bounties paid. Make the bounty amount based on the overall value of the caravan being attacked and put on when the attacker dies. To add more flavor to it and actually provide some benefit of beating attackers, can make a portion of the bounty be paid off to defenders as "compensation". Or something similar where attackers lose all durability on all their equipped gear when killed by defenders, and gold cost of repair be given to defenders as loot. No gold being dropped from the attacker directly, but ends up being the attacker loses gold to defender since they need to spend the same gold to repair their gear. This I think brings a bit of Albion flavor into the mix where attackers coming with better gear potentially will lose more "gold", but similarly provide more gold to defenders. This incentives high quality defenders beating high quality attackers. Similarly, attackers that decide to zerg with more people, worse gear, has challenges of having more people for once, and their disadvantage against smaller numbered but more powerful defenders. Actually the more I think about this the more this sounds like it'd be an AWESOME risk/reward balance that'll really make caravans have so much variety. In a nut shell: -Attackers lose $$ if they die. -Defenders get extra $$ for beating attackers. We can look at some of the balance here by how the value of the caravan is calculated to the attackers losses. For example, calculate it based on # of defenders: For 10 defenders, each attacker death has a repair/bounty cost of %10 of Caravan value. Where as for 20 defenders, it's a %5 cost. Meaning attacking a caravan that has more defenders, hast less of a loss for attackers that die, but more if attacking caravans with less defenders. For attackers, the less numbers they have, the higher their share will be, but based on the # of defenders, the higher or lower their cost will be. Makes a small group of strong pvpers have less loss dying to large groups of defenders, while having higher potential profit from winning, but a higher chance to lose from being out numbered. On the flip side, attackers dealing with a smaller group of defenders have a higher chance to win, but also higher losses if they die. Making small groups of elite defenders also viable. If they're getting attacked a larger group of attackers, each of those attackers will have a very high loss at death due to low defender count. We can further balance this by locking caravan attack and defender groups so this can't be abused. Caravan defenders locked to "x" number of defenders when the Caravan form, who GAIN BIG BOUNTY for betraying the caravan. Implement pvp damage tracking so defenders who are throwing, are counter as having betrayed the Caravan. Same for attackers, where their Caravan group is locked at "x" number, as in within the group/raid limits of the game, as well as the number being locked in for some maybe 15-30 minutes prior to being able to attack Caravans. INHALES COPIUM. PLEASE IMPLEMENT THAT!!!!
Ya know, this is obviously the dream for a lot of MMO fans, but I can't help but feel like the sheer scope of this is gonna cause a LOT of problems. How will they balance this sort of thing? Theyr creating so many "systems" to try and make a living world but ultimately MMO PvP players play to get strong. People will only do the most efficient activities that yield the best rewards. Also it'll really only take 1 good, o ganized guild to just dominate. WoW had a serious problem on most servers where one side vastly outnumbered the other. I love the ideas. I love devs reaching for the starts and being ambitious, but I'm gonna reserve my hype for this game until we see how this stuff actually plays out.
that first scenario, if the game is like that it will 100% die. as gankers will get mad there's no1 to gank, as ppl wont run these caravans if they always get ganked and get nothing from those who attempted the gank. Eve work because its two sided risk, a one sided risk game will die immediately upon arrival. so im pretty sure that scenario wont make it into the final product as is.
This game should have mounted combat, just imagine you are beign attacked by overwhelming bandits, and suddenly you look up to a cliff and there are the Rohirrim from a close node coming to help, would be really cool.
Mounts with strong combat-opener abilities = very good! Mounted combat = not good! Large mounted clashes sound dope but you don't want the entirety of pvp and combat to revolve around being mounted. Would be dope to see a mount charge knockdown which starts combat though. Kind of like how rogues in WoW can open on you from stealth with strong stealthed abilities.
The potential implications of a faction based reputation as a deterrent is interesting, if the rewards for leveling the defenders is to strong no one will want to attack and vice versa. Here's to hoping Intrepid is up to the task.
When I was watching the livestream, the first thing that came out to my mind was stream sniping. Imagine a situation where streamers with around 50 ~ 1000 avg viewers, spending 2h+ hours with his guildmates collecting materials for the caravan only to be lost right at the moment they're doing the caravan run by streamsniper guilds with 500+ players.
Anyone who decides to stream themselves setting up and launching a caravan will kind of deserve it. It seems one of the biggest factors of making a successful caravan run is secrecy so putting it all online for the world to see seems pretty dumb imo.
I would really like to see if they can implement mechanics and systems that can "control" and appeal to those agressive incels players that only want pvp and PK all the day all the times, stealing and breaking others experiences etc. I guess the idea of marking them as "bandits" and give them some systems that can help them in exchange of high risk/rewards could be a potential gameplay that is appealing to all the community as they are going to do "their thing" and hate overall, but also honourable players can play and defend against them in someway of some sort of balancing these behaviours. (Sorry my english I hope I could explain something understandable)
This issue & example I posted about YEARS AGO. People went out of their way including Intrepid staff to avoid it. So they had Literally years to work out systems for this. Your example is Fantasy & has no basis in real life gaming...As seen in every mmo to date, PUG VS players Vs established guilds you literally referenced part of the reason why. "Might off the risk" No progression is a Reward. Their is literally currently NO RISK for attacking except lost time, but a good time & progression to skills towards it.
This game is like eve online but in an heroic fantasy world. Wonder if players are ready and enough motivated on the long term for that. Hope the devs are aware of all the implications.
Did you forget, that you will be able to Hire/Join as Caravan deffender/Attacker as a mercenary for a rewards? There will be plenty opurtunity even for solo players to join these "caravan missions" + you will be able to send multiple caravans, meaning that not every caravan is full, some could be decoy without any loot at all to waste enemy guild time and resources when actuall caravan with loot is taking different road.
Narc obviously FINALLY realized that his obsessive levels of detail for a game that doesn't exist are not healthy. This video needed more thought or maybe let's say more disclosure. I'm not saying he's wrong to the extent of the things that he covers, but he left out a lot of stuff in doing so. That's fine when you're just commenting or showcasing items, but it's not good when you're trying to lay the foundation of an argument and draw conclusions.
*They never said what happens after you choose the "Attack Caravan" option in the field instead of "Defend Caravan" and only mentioned that Bandit and Defender progression was available. They also never said what happens to your character after you sell stolen goods or certificates to a Black Market vendor. Only Gold was mentioned. My guess is, these two actions separate the Harrassers - from wanted Criminals - who become food for Bounty Hunter progression.*
Yes. But I think y'all all going in KNOWING that. If it's "ugly" it'll hurt the game some. If it's "normal" stuff, and the game has systems in place to "deal with it" (in short; something ELSE to be doing to progress your Toon while you wait on said Griefers to move on.) it'll be fine.
I just hope there visual identification to label people what node there citizen with or vasseled to so there 5 nations when all metro are built up so we know if were raiding opponent caravans or defending ally ones and so on.
I think the risk for attackers just being death is fine, caravan owners get to choose when, where and what they're moving so as long as you have at least 4 or 5 guards I imagine you won't get ganked like in the livestream because no one is going to know your moving goods ahead of time and you'll only have to deal with solo players most of the time and sense they won't be able to solo your small squad the caravan defender tree will encourage them to sign on to help you guard it if anything. The times that this sort of gank does happen will likely be with the larger guilds or apposing kingdoms moving war supplies that will be easier to socially infiltrate. Even if another guild does learn your route and what time your doing it, deciding the time is a huge advantage because the caravan guilds schedule is probably not going to be ideal for the bandit guilds. If the attackers had any less risk than wasted time and death I would actually worry that no one would bother attacking caravans.
I see bandit nodes popping up on paths between two larger economy nodes. It's okay the bandit nodes are smaller. I also see the econ nodes going to war vs the bandit nodes if they get too uppity. I'm actually really excited by the politics that will come from caravans and don't know if I want to be a bandit or a merchant!
In short yes. As long as pvp isn't optional griefers will grief and non-pvp enjoyers will enjoy something else. All of this is irrelevant unless the game actually releases of course.
Here's my Power Fantasy: Node Sieges and Guild-v-Guild combat will probably evolve to hinge on a strategic resource, without which engaging in a war is doomed to failure. Top tier siege weapons, top-tier PVP potions, etc. These will require expert gatherers, processors, and crafters to produce. One of those three will be a bottleneck (I suspect Processing, since that's Freehold-bound) and whomever is able to control that bottleneck will in effect be the kingmakers on the server. Since they'll almost certainly be Artisan-skill focused players and not combat specialists, they won't be able to directly intervene, but they can encourage hardcore guilds to siege something down or whatever else with promise of the necessary resources to do it. I think that's pretty exciting and I hope that's possible within the structure of the game.
The way to combat excessive ganking is to make the world big enough and make distance matter so that it is fairly easy to avoid large groups if you are careful
Interesting video, I never thought about the social aspects of caravans. Especially the relationships between nodes and vassal nodes, should be interesting to see if that cooperation will exist in practice.
Thank you for bringing up these points, I definitely agree that it's an issue. What really bothers me though is that even Margaret mentioned the issue explicitly to Steven on stream, his response wasn't exactly reassuring. He basically said, "yes, caravan drivers take risks." Like... Yes, we know. We're wondering what risks the ATTACKERS have. I also think the mass-invite random group setting for these battles is a bad idea. How's a group of random players without coordinated voice communication supposed to decided in a short period of time before the defenders respawn whose caravan is going to make the new pickup and where it's going to go? How're you supposed to trust the person making the delivery to pay you out fairly when they're the only ones who can see all the contents and can't even fully unload or sell the goods right away after delivering? Who's to stop one or two people from cracking open all the crates as soon as the zergfest is over and ruining any chance of a caravan payout? I agree that reputation will carry some weight, but we're talking about a massive game with thousands of players online at a time. All it takes is one or two people on the assault team that you didn't even organize to start cracking crates to ruin the raid for everyone who wanted to try and complete the delivery. I think player-driven-caravan PvP needs to be pre-made groups only with multiple attacking teams going up against each other and the defenders at the same time. That way, you can communicate effectively with, form plans with, and actually trust all the people you're grouped with. Even then, we're still left with the issue of how attackers should take an equivalent amount of risk to the defenders, as well as how to limit the number of people allowed to attack the defenders if multiple attack groups are allowed... Tricky. Best I can think of for the attacker limit is a soft cap. If there are spaces left below the soft cap, you can go up to five over with your group, but if the soft cap is reached or exceeded by any group, then you'll be rejected. So the max number of people you'll ever be attacked by will only be a full raid size give or take like 5 people. Any other group too big to join will be rejected with a message telling them the number of spots left below the max cap. As for Risk v Reward, I think that the reputation argument can be made much, much better if we eliminate the random group dogpiling and instead require pre-mades for caravan attacks. That way the groups, who're most likely spearheaded by different guilds, can be held accountable.
Making Caravans too difficult to attack will destroy the system. Also if you're thinking about macro-wise (as Narc suggests), you'll want to defend those resources for protecting your node and attack other caravans from other nodes you wish to control in order to have a better time during node sieges. Caravans = Attacker Advantage. Nodes = Defender Advantage. Balance.
Thank you for all the coverage and content. Also, if/when theres more info out, could you do another video on the planned crafting system? Heres to doing work that makes you happy 🍺🍻🍺
So from what I can tell the current design IS to allow pugs to smoothly group up, contend on either side, and part ways without any major restrictions to pure participation. This is less so when you have personal caravans, but seems to be the case for all of them. Now is this good? To have essentially mobile lobbies you can instantly join be you solo or premade? Maybe not, but I would like to get some more testing out of it. A few things I have noted however is that I do not like the "just run" viability of defenders on the caravan just rushing past attackers. I also agree that there seems to not be much risk for bandits during the attacking of a caravan. However this might be countered by the fact that they are put in the same boat as the defenders if they do succeed in taking the caravan, meaning they will then have the same risk as the prior defenders to claim their rewards. What I would like to see is a separate health bar for the horses, letting you attack and "knock them down" at 0% hp, halting the caravan until they are healed to a certain threshold. There should be tools available to the carriage to do this healing to some degree just in case there are no healers around. I feel this the best way to reduce the amount of "chase" fights as the combat doesn't seem too good on the move.
People are looking at the caravan thing in too much of a vacuum. There are so many better things for players to be doing with their time on this game than trying to intercept caravans. Also, since the whole point is to progress the nodes more so than just personal gain, there is less incentive to gank caravans in your own sphere of influence/kingdom. It’s more likely to sometimes try to interrupt trade in neighboring kingdoms, but due to travel time and effort it just isn’t the kind of thing where griefing will be out of control. Attacking other nodes is much more on the level of acceptable pvp practices than it is griefing. People who don’t follow ashes closely don’t understand the social aspects and social incentives of the game because there are no other games like it.
The answer at the end is such a nonnfricken answer... as he says "to answer that question," he, in fact, did not answer that question. And this isn't the first time he's done it. I like Steven, but he is avoiding the topic and this question entirely. The outcome is yet to be seen, but all of us who've played every game this is being modeled after knows that implementing a pure risk vs reward structure doesn't work.... specifically when only one side is taking on the risk. If this isn't addressed we can all sadly watch this game die, because without the proper systems in place and balancing the systems they have it will not succeed no matter how much we or they want it to.
My biggest concern with the emphasis on the sociality of the game is the invasion of massive communities that will inevitably have the biggest footholds on launch. Yeah, it is engrained into the mechanics that you will want to incentivize your node to progress by being a place other want to come to. But what if you already have a community of 1000+ that are ALREADY there? Where is the risk in that community? Streamers like Asmon, Shroud, Tyler1, and many others already have a fanbase that will do just about anything they say. And on the guild recruitment forums there are massive guilds planning to monopolize nodes or guild castles. How is Intrepid giving those communities a 'risk" when they can zerg through every risk and obtain the most rewards? The counter argument: It would be wrong to say that there should be a punishment or a ball&chain on people who have worked really hard to build up their own community and want to play a game with them. I myself would like to have a guild for this game that quite literally doesn't exist so that I too can enjoy the rewards with my friends and have a foothold in a space of the game. It would be very unreasonable for the community to shut down my attempts at such and to shut down the successful growth of other communities. One of the ways people battle risk is through corporation and working together to achieve a common goal, whether that group is massive or a few people should be irrelevant In short Eventually, a community is going to become so big that there is no risk, but is that something that Intrepid needs to manage?
A lot of people will gather around a streamer to be part of something greater, but it will also attract people who will play bandit and try to focus all the fanboy.
"The risk is the unknown" ... except my KNOW that attackers have zero risk lol A massive issue I had with the game was the rock paper scissors combat (as explained). There is nothing more infuriating than being unable to outplay. I hope it isn't as how they describe. Sometimes requiring your content to be too socially focused can be to the detriment of players.
Instead of 15 guild members protecting a Caravan of a trader, won’t the guild just use those 15 individuals to move the goods via their inventory? Probably faster as well
I think what we primarily need are incentives for defenders to engage in defending the "kingdom" they inhabit. I could easily see myself travelling through the realm I call home and defending caravans for days. Its just a nice fantasy and sounds like fun for people who like pvp. But if thats a net negative, because I can't even cover my repair costs by defending poor bastards for free who cannot afford mercs, then that will have its limits. I don't struggle to imagine some node faction who has special rewards for stuff like that though.
UO was a griefer's paradise, and was ultimately why I left it. Getting ganked every 3 minutes stopped being fun after a while. Great game otherwise, though. Stuck with it for 2 years.
I can see guilds getting rep as corrupt hunters and caravan guards. Or even as flank guards on dungeon/raid. Imagine getting paid gold to watch the back of another guild attempting a world boss? The potential for new style of game play with ashes is so exciting
I know a question like that was asked but I forget what the answer was. Will there be an option to banish a player from a node? That could be one way to dispose of highwaymen in your own node. So that their risk of loosing is them wasting shit loads of time respawning at their own node and running back to their hunting grounds. In eve online which is basically a fast travel simulator that is a valid form of discouragement for null sec gankers. Also implementing gear loss and exp vamp would be a good way to make the stakes higher for gankers. And successfully defending a caravan would be rewarding beyond just the fun of winning in PVP.
This is one thing I also thought about during this video. If there is a way that your actions hurt your own node, it will be exploited by players. Just send a large group of people to a rival node at sabotage it, easy.
The node system is not going to stop caravan ganking. The nodes get xp from adventurers questing. The Caravan does not help nor hinder that. I feel you believe that people will be more likely to quest in areas where a large guild/group is patrolling and repelling Caravan attacks, but there is nothing saying a guild like that would be in power in any major node. The only node type that holds elections is the Scientific type.
People worried about caravans have never played Null Sec in Eve Online. 40% mining and industry, 20% combat, and 40% getting to and from Jita. And we developed strategies to get there safely. Rogue & rangers are going to be in high demand. Imagine, playing a Ranger class and doing ranger activities. Unheard of!!
Sorta unrelated but does anyone know if theres other pvp related sorts of activities besides caravans? Things that have this "no corruption gained" type stuff. The other one I am aware of is the castle sieges. Like in totality we got: PvE (grinding, world bosses), gathering, caravans, castle sieges. Am I missing things?
Make attacker not able to revive for 2h once they die in the raid can also be something . Then people will think before attacking everything they see on the map .
anything that is considered "a gathering material" which goes specifically into your "gathering bag" and, you only drop a % of it, not all x there's also some more indepth info but I won't get too deep into it x hope this helps x
Simple solution, give attackers and all gear a Value based on market prices (or whatever) you need that many coins in your bag to attack and not lose any gear, otherwise you drop gear in the intended value but rounded up. risk/reward achieved.
To be fair I would not consider this hardcore pvp at all this is akin to say Archeage if you want true hardcore pvp that would be Eve online,Albion online, Darkfall and probably more mmo's out there I can't think of atm
This game is either going to be a moderate success or a complete failure. I really don't see it going any other way. I think the concept of the game is awesome, and I think the target audience they're aiming it at will never have the time to dedicate to it to make the game work as intended .... not for very long. There'll be an awesome honeymoon period for six months to a year post launch and then people will start feeling the grind. And one day you'll log in and lose your stuff due to being ganked by some group of fools and that don't care about anything like node building or what not, they're just out to ruin someone's day. And you'll quit the game, maybe not forever but for a month, three .. a year ..... meaning a player that was building the game world as intended has left. Multiply yourself by 100K. And after the griefers can't find that many people to piss off .... guess what they do .... times that by 100K. Suddenly a game that NEEDS constant player interaction to make its systems function has intended isn't working as intended. That leads to frustration and Schmoe X quits ..... times that by 100K.
I wonder if somehow it wouldn't be raw force that would be required to defend the caravan... like in the real world, if you can hold off a criminal long enough, they will be fearful of capture or the authorities coming. I'm not saying going as far as having invincible NPC guards spawn in or something but, ya know... I dunno, some additional meter or something that, depending upon certain conditions, would give the caravan a slight edge in the struggle for the goods. I dunno.
Maybe mercenary groups could help defend and somehow be hidden ON THE CARAVAN... i.e. by visual inspection the caravan may look easy to overtake, lightly defended, etc... but out jump a badass high level mercenary group.
@12:15 ok so if my caravan is going to be valuable, I better invest even more resources to provision it increasing the risk even more for reasons. I need to bring as many people as possible to guard against the gankers or even hire mercenary guilds BUT I also need to make sure information is restricted to a CLOSE circle of friends who all happen to be online at the 'unique' time I chose to launch the caravan to avoid as many people online as possible, good thing none of us have jobs or other real life obligations. Got it, easy-peasy. A great answer to the question "how will risk vs. reward be balanced for both the caravan attackers and defenders". It'll be fine.
I agree, that having a black market/fence will rather be detrimental to a node unless it is used very frequently. That would mean though, that there are a lot of thieves/highwaymen/robbers in that area and honest merchants avoiding it. That also leads to robber raids having to travel further to find caravans and having to travel a long way back to the home node(more risk of being raided themselves). One more thing you didn't mention is the sheer size of the map. So many wannabe thieves dream of the outlaw life of robbing one caravan after the other and swimming in gold. I rather see groups of thuglifers being bored in the woods while waiting for a caravan to come by and if one appears, being to scared to attack because the defenders look too strong. Big raids waiting for prey are easy to spot and you only need one post in area chat to spoil the spoils. One more thing, we haven't heard about much is the bounty hunter system. I don't think, it will necessarily be only tied to the corruption system. Wouldn't make much sense. Killing corrupted is already easy and rewarding in itself. You don't get corruption from attacking a caravan, but they never said that there will be no penalty at all. You might get a bounty on your head, that reveals the general area, where you're at. If you keep robbing, it might even reveal your exact location. So the risk for a successful attack, might be, that you have an assassin on your heels for a week. I mean, it would make sense. Who has bounties on their head? Killers? Thieves? Highwaymen?
People seriously underestimate how personal reputation is going to affect the player base. This isn't wow where you can ninja loot or open world pvp and then random queue into a bg or raid wothout any repercussion. It seems like it will be kingdom vs kingdom, but i also expect that there may be a lot of guilds that will travel far beyond their neighbors borders to just scout around and find caravans to raid, possibly in lower level nodes as to not piss off those with too much influence.
The problem with this caravan PvP event is: Either you show up with a large clan and protect the caravan. All the attackers see, that there are sitting 50+ people on the caravan and protect it, so they don't engage into it, when they are severely outnumbered. In this scenario 50+ people are doing nothing for several hours until the caravan reaches its destination. Or some other large clan sees this loot piñata and shows up with 100+ people and just curb stomp the guarding clan. For maximum moral damage, they wait for as long as possible and stop the caravan close to its target location and then just break open the chests to ruin the whole thing. (and I'm not pulling this out of my ass, I've witnessed drama like this in other MMOs. There's a lot of people that get a lot of fun out of just ruining other peoples days. Literally mindset of "ruin fun for others" > "in game profits") So the protector will basically always have a frustrating game experience. Either they get to experience maximum boring guarding with no action. Or they will probably get curb stomped by a much larger attacker after having "wasted" a lot of time with guarding the caravan. Or did I miss some overarching mechanic, that'll prevent these scenarios from being the prime PvP caravan experience? ---------------------- Fun fact: In human history battles were rarely fought with similar soldier numbers. Usually it was a slaughtering where one side had many more men than the other. So this behaviour is very natural, smart and makes a lot of sense. But as most of the time "real life logic stuff" doesn't translate into fun game play in a virtual world space. ----------------------- I hope our @Narc reads this and will give his opinion on it.
This is what Alpha2 balancing is for. If caravans aren't getting through, you make them stronger, or you have attackers have a chance to drop gear on death.
I spent a lot of time in Archeage walking across the map in stealth carrying a single pack at a time just to get my character strong enough to hold his own against average players... then I joined a guild with a bunch of absolutely mental aussies who were amazing -- and all we did was try to ruin the pack transfers of the biggest whale on the server.
i love risk v reward so much (i played alot of albion) that i forgot that there might be a reward. My motto: Kerngedanke, REIN! - Core tought, GOING IN! Often spent millions on top quality gear that would make gankers straight up nut when they see me for pvp, only to jump into the masses to drop my dmg and come out of the quick engage with my nutsack missing.
From archeage experience you have to consider time. As a bandit you invest time sitting on the roadside waiting for caravans. This time you could use for something else like farming gear, gathering resources etc. Your risk is wasting your time if no caravan comes or the caravans that come are defended to good. Don't forget, that the attackers won't always win and that having 5+ people sit on the side of a road for maybe hours isn't that much fun for most people.
Yes, plus the harder caravan are to move around, the more valuable ressources becomes, so there is an equilibrium at which taking the risk is worth for defenders
As I walk up the hills and to the caravan they defend I take a look at them and realize they wont mend 'Cause I've been grindin' and expin' so long that Even my momma thinks that my real life is gone And I always crossed a man that didn't deserve it Me be treated like a pker, ya know, that's how I serve 'em You better watch out in which area of Verra you step and walkin' Or you and your homies might be end up in a chair like Stephen Hawkin' I really like to grief, and you wont stay loc As they croak, I see myself and my arrows smoke Fool, I'm the kinda PKer the little noobies wanna be like Going out in the night, you wont see me even under the brightest streetlight Tell me why are they so blind to see That the ones we hurt are them by me? Been spendin' most their lives Livin' in a griefers' paradise Been spendin' most their lives Livin' in a griefers' paradise Keep spendin' most our lives Livin' in a griefers' paradise Keep spendin' most our lives Livin' in a griefers' paradise
There should be some risk to the bandits, otherwise it's just free loot. When someone knows a cavaran is coming, they'll just write in chat and the whole zone will go there, what is the caravan owner supposed to do against that many people... spend all the potential profit on bodyguard? And he might still not have enough people show up to escort than the amount of bandits you could gather.
This is why I hope travel or more specifically logistics will be an actual obstacle for this. Doesn't matter if everyone knows, if the caravan reaches the goal 10 min before every bandit arrives. Same reason I hope there's nothing like a global chat. Information flows should be restricted by the game, even if discord and co are an option. They cannot be everywhere.
My opinion, just as I wrote in another place: it doesn't make any sense. I don't really have a problem with the caravan system. There's something that, as I see it, nobody is taking into account: time and expectations. Unless you have a spy, there's no way to know when a caravan is departing and what valuables it has. Are you telling me that I'll be wasting time, hours or days waiting for a caravan to pass who knows where, just to attack it? I beg your pardon but it doesn't make sense at all. This is a huge risk: wasted time for an empty or not valuable caravan or impossible to attack because it's stronger than my team. The caravan system is fine as it is.
they need incentives for randoms to join either attacking or defending without being part of a premade raid. if it's going to be a dynamic pvp event, the game itself needs to reward players for defending, not the players
Social MMO, yep. I hope that non-English-speaking players will be able to find what they're looking for with dedicated servers (German-speaking, French-speaking, Spanish-speaking, etc.).
@@Narc I have read the wiki a long time ago (yeah the whole damn thing D: ) and i honestly dont remember that. BUT I DO KNOW, you know what youre speaking about so I will take your word at face value. Would be interesting to see some type of risk for the attackers failing in the attack though.... other wise it will be a greifable constant for that LOOP. (*this isnt the ONLY griefable system in the game. you will also have people griefing harvestable nodes that may require aging that has a ultra rare mat for a endgame crafting.... that will be a issue im sure)
I love how Steven didn't answer the question at the end of the video at all, so i guess that means there is no risk for the attackers and this is going to be a griefers paradise...
Crybaby. How about you get a group of friends? I literally already invited like 30 people to join me and some guild ingame so we can fight bandits and protect our loot, meanwhile you're crying about it. It's a social MMO. This isn't WoW or FF. Solo players are doomed. Start being social. Talk to people, get yourself into a clan and form a group of players like you so you can have fun with the game. Whining does nothing.
Top guilds using caravans. Even if you put a high risk for attackers of caravans, that will only hurt smaller guilds. The Top guilds will only fear other top guilds or the masses. Same when it comes to owning a node. People will have to hope for "Top" guilds to be helpful, not only for themselves. You will most likely see a lot of Union being made to balance things out. The beginning of the game will madness and cut throat. Which i truly enjoy the most lol
you can juggle as many bullshit mechanics to "balance" the game, but with a system like this the only way both sides have a risk and meaningful consequences is with perma death. honor and social systems will be exploited, anyone that has played mmo's for a few years knows this if world of warcraft had a system where you lose gear/resources when killed by other players it would have been doa
"can a node with toxic players succeed?" YES, because everyone will join that faction and whoever doesnt will quit the game, and after a few weeks without people to grief they will quit themselves seriously man, havent you played mmos for the last 10 years? big streamers will create factions that dominate their server, and anyone against them will get stomped. their world will be law for their simp army and if they decide "hey, lets fuck with this guy until he quits" it shall be done
Solutions for caravan system and maybe future griefs There is no way a guild is active 24/7 and also there is no way every one can bring ppl to protect his Caravan so this system is usefull only for big organised guilds, most of the people playing mmos are not part of Big organised guilds and many of them want to log in after a day of hard work to do some stuff and relax. so. 1. Caravan system using few of Silkroads rules set(first caravan system in mmos) Not all caravans are attackable for expample if you are a solo player trying to make a small profit by buying and selling via caravan a small amount of goods the system protects you. players can not attack small value caravans , this system protects you from griefers and trolls . Now if you create a caravan with high value items then you better get your self some protection 2. the Caravan raid event i personally i like this pug event. there can be 2 type of caravans A. guild run caravan( when a guild can fill a raid -invite only type) B.Public Caravan (free to join as long as there are spots left) To make it work the reward for defenders must be lucrative also both attackers and defenders have to get a debuff so they cant switch sides or steal goods as defender and attackers join the defenders Both debuffs have to last until the event ends . Events like this must be 2 raid limited once full cant participate or attack someone. Event ends only when Caravan is fullfiled. Defenders get the defend reward, Attackers split the stolen goods rewards among all raid members plus attack reward. Attackers get a 24h debuff and they cant become attackers to another caravan, but they can participate as defenders.
The beauty of social sandbox is that it's self correcting. If a bunch of people are camping trade routes in groups, guess what, a second group will form and wipe them in predictable areas. Or the node will become shunned by traders and people will go elsewhere, which will result in the guild controlling the adjacent node/s will loose influence. So it's actually in the management's best interest to help traders in most cases. This will all spark PvP which is the whole point of the caravans being the "kickstarter" of the chain reaction of open world content.
I put some extra effort into this one considering i've taken a short break from streaming, i'll continue to up the quality during this week off x
Come follow the stream for the return on thursday: www.twitch.tv/Narciverse
What did you notice during this showcase future narc?
Now I'm desperate to know what you noticed.
I didn't watch the showcase, but from what you said it sounded like the attacking/harassing group would just re-spawn and repeatedly attack. That seems a tad off to me, but it might be ok.
Gankers paradise? Where can I pre-order?
With how you attack the caravan and such there should be a breakdown of goods, hard to believe smashing and burning a caravan and the loot is still undamaged, maybe that should be part of the balancing, will also incentivize killing attackers as quickly as possible so they don't damage your loot. Doesn't fix it but just makes sense considering those caravans light on fire...
I plan on playing this game when it comes out. I haven't been excited to play a new MMO since SWTOR was released. I do have some very real concerns with the way that the node system works. Many years ago, before Discord even existed, I played Evony. It's a browser based game. Basically an MMO resource/spread sheet kind of game. In that game you can attack your neighbors. The combat was just X number enemy rolls dice against Y number of defender and whoever had the most superior troops won the outcome, and could raid your base or even conquer it completely. What's relevant here is that in response to that, players would form alliances. After the first month the entire map is sectioned off into states owned by certain guilds. Any solo player was just there for a little while, got farmed by the people in a guild, and then quit.
Here's how this plays out. Guilds form alliances. Everything is good, the balance of power isn't too far out of line and then this happens: "Hey, why is player X attacking my base? I'm part of guild Y and we have an alliance" "Sorry, he doesn't know any better. I'll tell him to stop." A few hours later you find out that the guild that you had an alliance with betrayed you, joined up with your enemy, and now they destroy your guild. In theory, that's fun. It's where that leads to that concerns me. Eventually you just end up with one giant empire that bully's everyone else out of the game. Then the empire has nobody left to bully. Nobody can trust each other enough to break away from the empire and form a resistance, then the empire quits the game and the game is just dead.
I mentioned that this was before the days of Discord. Now with Discord being a ubiquitous aspect of the gaming community, the ability to facilitate mass alliances and combat is so strong that I believe that this type of scenario will not only play out, but be played out quicker in Ashes of Creation. I know that what I am about to say is an impossibility but, if there was a way to limit communication to only in game, and not only in game but only face to face communication between players, it would so severely cut down the ability to mass organize and also mass betray, that groups would never turn into these giant mega empires. There would always be a back and forth battle between factions, alliances, betrayals. THAT....would be amazing! Unfortunately it would never be possible to implement and with today's ability to mass communicate I have a very strong sense that Ashes is going to have a very short life span. A great concept, that is just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rewind the clock 20 years and this concept is the pinnacle of gaming.
"Get Vassaled Nerd" is gonna be such a great insult.
More like the flag of someone sitting in a room surrounded by pizza boxes and Pepsi cans😂 go ahead, get your alpha moment
I choked on my drink with the enveus joke. Great video.
I think we still need to test the risk factor for the attackers, I understand the social aspect of it, but systems not always play as they are designed, and less when left in hands of the players.
Yeah but the main over arching point of the game is to advance the nodes and your kingdom, not just your personal gain. So there really is less incentive to disrupt trade in your own area. This is where Ashes is so much different than other games.
Attackers should just become full lootable when they die. Maybe you could even loot some exp from them that they lose.
The whole node system won't stop griefers because they're not interested in building up nodes. They want your resources for to sell for money for personal gain OR they're bots that just sell gold. And it won't be one specific pack of griefers doing it, it'll just be a constant chain of different groups going after different targets that results in you never being able to transfer your stuff. You never stay in one place, you always keep moving in PvP. You havet o make it *personally* risky to attack a Caravan on the same level that it is personally risky to move a Caravan.
Another possible way to address this is if you attack a Caravan, you immediately go on a Wanted board in the area and you become an outlaw/fugitive that everyone who kills you gets a reward for doing it. And maybe you get an icon by your name that shows you're a Wanted man. This is actually why Lineage 2's karma system was revolutionary for its time. There were consequences for griefing.
I think players becoming fully lootable just means that they will never attack caravans, unless they know they always win (which just isnt fun, you want to engage in pvp where both sides could win). I do agree that there needs to be some risk to the attackers however. So maybe have them be partially lootable? Maybe one or two items. Normally wpvp in AoC will be risk vs reward since you drop mats upon death and gain corruption. But if you are attacking a caravan you wont have mats on you and you also dont gain corruption since its counted as a pvp event.
The second idea i really like. But you still want people to engange in caravan pvp, so you need to be careful with a system like that so it isnt too punishing.
Agree that attackers should be lootable, and everyone involved should have a chance for items to totally break on death. If they want this to be a game where players are the economy and it actually functions well, then there will have to be item loss in some form, either through items breaking over time or being destroyed upon death.
You are underestimating the punishment of becoming hated and becoming vasseled. Basically those types of players would be on wanted boards anyways...it's just those wanted boards would be player-made. They also would end up at a disadvantage in pvp because they wouldn't have access to the same gear and buffs as the players of more advanced nodes.
Thing is, attacking a caravan isn't griefing. it is highly encouraged and expected gameplay. And it's a core part of the game...
Attacking a caravan isn't griefing to begin with.
Narc out here ignoring the fact that getting a caravan to the toxic node is going to pay very well
What people that dont have a serious Lineage2 backround cant understand is that the game will be about groups of 8, constant parties/CPs like we call them, that are part of big guilds, but those groups of 8, will be a team that farm together, defend together, making money together, owning multiple characters etc etc. So caravans will be mostly CP content, to make money. Now about other ppl attacking etc, in lineage2, and i am reffering there, because Steve was an L2 player, said many times L2 is one of the inspirations for AoC, and actually the whole pvp system with flag and corruption if you kill some unflagged is 100% L2 system, there is this HUGE aspect that is called politics. And politics in an open world mmo with pvp like that is EVERYTHING. CPs will have toons just to pk/kill other people, perma corrupted parked in their spots, means to come and harrass you in your farming etc etc. Friendship deals, money deals, legendary bosses etc will be huge factor. So after some time, dont expect people randomly attack caravans because there will be consequences!
This game is made with oldschool philosophy, for groups and socialization, open world pvp and pk, alliances and political backstabs, covered with some mambo jumbo theories to attract solo players.
I know for a fact that big clans and groups from L2 are waiting for these fun days, BUT STEVEN HURRY! AS TIME PASSES WE ARE GETTING SERIOUSLY OLDER!
The most I can say is maybe. MMOs have become pop-in/drop-out because the target audience tends to be older with responsibilities now. Having a second job in a video game is not appealing in modern times.
@@cmike123 Nah, that has become so common place because there are no good new games. People are still playing wow sod after decades on the game. It’s just not that appealing. Other games are so tailored around personal gain that they lose appeal quickly. If Intrepid succeeds at building the game they intend to, it will capture the target audience and people will love it.
@@jonathanhaven1690 I'll push back by saying WoW was the first game to make MMOs bite-sized. From Dungeon/Raid Finders to quest givers having exclamations over their head. Ashes looks to be aiming at a time before all of that. I just dont think the modern gamer is up to it. Everybody rushes to end game. Taking 3 days to craft an item would be like asking to cut your own dick off. And God forbid a dungeon last 6 hours or more.
FF14 used group of 8 system and it wasn't great, it just made "clicks" of smaller group within the guild, and making any progress without a solid static was impossible.
I much perfer the way FF11 was setup, where much larger groups was required and rotation of people within that large group was not outside the norm.
AoC being a very open world game (not all inside closed off dungeons) I'm hoping it's not going to simply stick to a 8man static group.
That acronym is not it bro use another one
I love this idea of Kingdoms vs Kingdoms. Certain nodes might be a highly contested PVP zone and the mayor has to send resources to build up defenses for that city while they war with a neighbor. On the flip side you could have two allied kingdoms that support each other incase a large scale war breaks out. Bandits from waring factions could disrupt trade routes around these contested nodes.
I love the idea of being part of a kingdom where nearly everything I do has some kind of impact on it. The first iterations will probably not work 100 % as they expect and MMO players are masters in finding exploits, so I just hope that Intrepid will quickly move on exploits once they're found and just continually work to achieve their vision, even if it costs them some popularity of sandbox MMO players.
I said it ages ago, they want 'group play', but most people play majority of time solo. All mmos fail to see this.
Caravan system seems hard to balance coz if there is no risk to attackers then it's trolls and gankers 24/7, but if there is too much risk then people will just ignore them and effectively win trade deliveries. I'm also interested to see if the node system just devolves into like 10 main cities, owned by the top 10 guilds spread out far enough that they can all get lots of vassals, and they just don't attack each other coz it's more beneficial to be friends.
Hmm. I hope there is a way to turn it off. Imagine just randomly running up on one.
Caravans seem cool. What are transporting. Goods. Goods to upgrade town merchants, guards, buildings? Food? Crafting mats?
Okay. But when attackers kill it they get some good loot.
Attackers I feel should only have like 3 trys after that they become alive spectators, they cannot attack no more. Further drop Gold for shared between the protectors, and one loot that they theyve selected in inventory (or a pop up that asked out these 3 items which will you drop). Nothing equipped though, but something above threshold of usefulness.
I do feel like nodes and some caravans should have npcs. That automatically war or protect caravans. I think ppl should beable to hire out ten npcs for caravans too, maybe at a local pub or barracks.
Lots of copiem.
My main thing is to have summoners be actual summoners. Not just summon something as an attack. I'd like a pet or pets that stay.
I imagine this is going to be "solved" as a playstyle by keeping the info of when your moving amongst those you trust and then going on the runs when you think most of your server is asleep reducing the amount of griefers that might be on.
Yeh, or as one caravan goes, so do others, in a mass convoy survival mechanism.
Or when events are occurring
Not to mention, there are that many fronts to progress your character in the game, harassing caravans is going to be pretty low on most people's priorities unless there are major conflict issues in the area. But in this case, if shit is majorly going down in an area, general trade will be less, general prices will be higher, and reward for braving the risk will also be higher
Until someone makes a spreadsheet and identified your guilds off peak hours and creates a dataset to predict when your most optimal time to move a caravan is, thereby changing when the 'meta time's is for such a move and it becomes unsolved within a day or two.
@Drazard there's also the underworld or whatever its called, and alternative routes (rivers) to other nodes.
I suppose it depends how scarce materials are going to be. I feel like ultimately that decions is going to be a massive factor on how aggressive caravan and node wars will be.
It would take social effort but you can run multiple caravans at the same time. It's probably realistic to organize two at once.
The opaque physical caravan advancements are mentioned, but not the ability to hire NPC guards (dependent on advancements). Two groups could run 2 caravans at once, and potentially double the NPC guards. [NPCs may not be great but they won't betray you, leave, disconnect, etc...] There's no ability for bandits to hire NPC bandits.
This video was a staged caravan event. The bandits knew exactly when and where to be and were mostly Rangers with camouflage.
Are 30 people going to drop what they're doing and RUN ACROSS A HUGE PHYSICAL WORLD WITH NO FAST TRAVEL and no flying mounts to go gank a caravan that's already halfway to its destination to pick up some random loot bags THAT CANNOT BE SOLD at traditional vendors? The risk is wasting your time. The reward seems to be very minimal. (What you can put in your backpack, it's not an efficient use of your time.)
Remember at the end of this video that literally NO ONE GOT PAID.
Plus they had to sit there while a bandit caravan was summoned to take those goods. That's even MORE time wasted for the gankers. How many players want to sit around like that to gain almost nothing except the joy of griefing?
Also after the fight, the bandits hang around and wait for a new caravan to arrive to cart off the spoils with NO ONE HARASSING THEM the entire time. The original caravan just gave up and never came back for revenge.
I really hope caravans wont be an integral part of the game, they look like a slow and painful chore to complete to progress.
Some sort of bounty system would be interesting. Attackers needing to pay bounty for source destination targets of caravans and be blacklisted there until bounties paid. Make the bounty amount based on the overall value of the caravan being attacked and put on when the attacker dies.
To add more flavor to it and actually provide some benefit of beating attackers, can make a portion of the bounty be paid off to defenders as "compensation".
Or something similar where attackers lose all durability on all their equipped gear when killed by defenders, and gold cost of repair be given to defenders as loot. No gold being dropped from the attacker directly, but ends up being the attacker loses gold to defender since they need to spend the same gold to repair their gear. This I think brings a bit of Albion flavor into the mix where attackers coming with better gear potentially will lose more "gold", but similarly provide more gold to defenders. This incentives high quality defenders beating high quality attackers. Similarly, attackers that decide to zerg with more people, worse gear, has challenges of having more people for once, and their disadvantage against smaller numbered but more powerful defenders.
Actually the more I think about this the more this sounds like it'd be an AWESOME risk/reward balance that'll really make caravans have so much variety.
In a nut shell:
-Attackers lose $$ if they die.
-Defenders get extra $$ for beating attackers.
We can look at some of the balance here by how the value of the caravan is calculated to the attackers losses. For example, calculate it based on # of defenders:
For 10 defenders, each attacker death has a repair/bounty cost of %10 of Caravan value.
Where as for 20 defenders, it's a %5 cost.
Meaning attacking a caravan that has more defenders, hast less of a loss for attackers that die, but more if attacking caravans with less defenders.
For attackers, the less numbers they have, the higher their share will be, but based on the # of defenders, the higher or lower their cost will be. Makes a small group of strong pvpers have less loss dying to large groups of defenders, while having higher potential profit from winning, but a higher chance to lose from being out numbered.
On the flip side, attackers dealing with a smaller group of defenders have a higher chance to win, but also higher losses if they die. Making small groups of elite defenders also viable. If they're getting attacked a larger group of attackers, each of those attackers will have a very high loss at death due to low defender count.
We can further balance this by locking caravan attack and defender groups so this can't be abused.
Caravan defenders locked to "x" number of defenders when the Caravan form, who GAIN BIG BOUNTY for betraying the caravan. Implement pvp damage tracking so defenders who are throwing, are counter as having betrayed the Caravan.
Same for attackers, where their Caravan group is locked at "x" number, as in within the group/raid limits of the game, as well as the number being locked in for some maybe 15-30 minutes prior to being able to attack Caravans.
INHALES COPIUM. PLEASE IMPLEMENT THAT!!!!
Make attackers fully lootable :)
Lol @ EnveusGaming getting slapped by a bald man
Ya know, this is obviously the dream for a lot of MMO fans, but I can't help but feel like the sheer scope of this is gonna cause a LOT of problems.
How will they balance this sort of thing?
Theyr creating so many "systems" to try and make a living world but ultimately MMO PvP players play to get strong. People will only do the most efficient activities that yield the best rewards.
Also it'll really only take 1 good, o ganized guild to just dominate. WoW had a serious problem on most servers where one side vastly outnumbered the other.
I love the ideas. I love devs reaching for the starts and being ambitious, but I'm gonna reserve my hype for this game until we see how this stuff actually plays out.
that first scenario, if the game is like that it will 100% die. as gankers will get mad there's no1 to gank, as ppl wont run these caravans if they always get ganked and get nothing from those who attempted the gank. Eve work because its two sided risk, a one sided risk game will die immediately upon arrival. so im pretty sure that scenario wont make it into the final product as is.
This game should have mounted combat, just imagine you are beign attacked by overwhelming bandits, and suddenly you look up to a cliff and there are the Rohirrim from a close node coming to help, would be really cool.
Some mounts will have combat abilities 👀
Mounts with strong combat-opener abilities = very good!
Mounted combat = not good!
Large mounted clashes sound dope but you don't want the entirety of pvp and combat to revolve around being mounted. Would be dope to see a mount charge knockdown which starts combat though. Kind of like how rogues in WoW can open on you from stealth with strong stealthed abilities.
than there comes chad thundercock, guild master of big dog on the server, mounted on his dragon spitting fire on everybody
like in black desert you can destroy baricade with horse and also kill enemy :D
that would more likely be a rat in cheap gear waiting to take ur loot or his xD
The potential implications of a faction based reputation as a deterrent is interesting, if the rewards for leveling the defenders is to strong no one will want to attack and vice versa. Here's to hoping Intrepid is up to the task.
Streaming is good and all, but you are first a foremost a content creator - This was a damn good edited video. Keep it up :)
When I was watching the livestream, the first thing that came out to my mind was stream sniping. Imagine a situation where streamers with around 50 ~ 1000 avg viewers, spending 2h+ hours with his guildmates collecting materials for the caravan only to be lost right at the moment they're doing the caravan run by streamsniper guilds with 500+ players.
Anyone who decides to stream themselves setting up and launching a caravan will kind of deserve it. It seems one of the biggest factors of making a successful caravan run is secrecy so putting it all online for the world to see seems pretty dumb imo.
That sounds kinda cool 😁
content
@@rayman17420 Yeah and that’s the exact kind of advanced strategy that’s fun that Ashes wants to reward.
If they have that many viewers they probably have that many defenders sounds fair to me
I would really like to see if they can implement mechanics and systems that can "control" and appeal to those agressive incels players that only want pvp and PK all the day all the times, stealing and breaking others experiences etc. I guess the idea of marking them as "bandits" and give them some systems that can help them in exchange of high risk/rewards could be a potential gameplay that is appealing to all the community as they are going to do "their thing" and hate overall, but also honourable players can play and defend against them in someway of some sort of balancing these behaviours. (Sorry my english I hope I could explain something understandable)
This issue & example I posted about YEARS AGO. People went out of their way including Intrepid staff to avoid it. So they had Literally years to work out systems for this. Your example is Fantasy & has no basis in real life gaming...As seen in every mmo to date, PUG VS players Vs established guilds you literally referenced part of the reason why. "Might off the risk" No progression is a Reward. Their is literally currently NO RISK for attacking except lost time, but a good time & progression to skills towards it.
This game is like eve online but in an heroic fantasy world. Wonder if players are ready and enough motivated on the long term for that. Hope the devs are aware of all the implications.
Did you forget, that you will be able to Hire/Join as Caravan deffender/Attacker as a mercenary for a rewards? There will be plenty opurtunity even for solo players to join these "caravan missions"
+ you will be able to send multiple caravans, meaning that not every caravan is full, some could be decoy without any loot at all to waste enemy guild time and resources when actuall caravan with loot is taking different road.
Narc obviously FINALLY realized that his obsessive levels of detail for a game that doesn't exist are not healthy.
This video needed more thought or maybe let's say more disclosure. I'm not saying he's wrong to the extent of the things that he covers, but he left out a lot of stuff in doing so. That's fine when you're just commenting or showcasing items, but it's not good when you're trying to lay the foundation of an argument and draw conclusions.
*They never said what happens after you choose the "Attack Caravan" option in the field instead of "Defend Caravan" and only mentioned that Bandit and Defender progression was available. They also never said what happens to your character after you sell stolen goods or certificates to a Black Market vendor. Only Gold was mentioned. My guess is, these two actions separate the Harrassers - from wanted Criminals - who become food for Bounty Hunter progression.*
Yes.
But I think y'all all going in KNOWING that.
If it's "ugly" it'll hurt the game some.
If it's "normal" stuff, and the game has systems in place to "deal with it" (in short; something ELSE to be doing to progress your Toon while you wait on said Griefers to move on.) it'll be fine.
I just hope there visual identification to label people what node there citizen with or vasseled to so there 5 nations when all metro are built up so we know if were raiding opponent caravans or defending ally ones and so on.
I think the risk for attackers just being death is fine, caravan owners get to choose when, where and what they're moving so as long as you have at least 4 or 5 guards I imagine you won't get ganked like in the livestream because no one is going to know your moving goods ahead of time and you'll only have to deal with solo players most of the time and sense they won't be able to solo your small squad the caravan defender tree will encourage them to sign on to help you guard it if anything. The times that this sort of gank does happen will likely be with the larger guilds or apposing kingdoms moving war supplies that will be easier to socially infiltrate. Even if another guild does learn your route and what time your doing it, deciding the time is a huge advantage because the caravan guilds schedule is probably not going to be ideal for the bandit guilds. If the attackers had any less risk than wasted time and death I would actually worry that no one would bother attacking caravans.
I see bandit nodes popping up on paths between two larger economy nodes. It's okay the bandit nodes are smaller. I also see the econ nodes going to war vs the bandit nodes if they get too uppity. I'm actually really excited by the politics that will come from caravans and don't know if I want to be a bandit or a merchant!
Be a mercenary and do a bit of both!
So player will be toxic in the node then once the node have bad reputation they will migrate somewhere else to be toxic again .
In short yes. As long as pvp isn't optional griefers will grief and non-pvp enjoyers will enjoy something else. All of this is irrelevant unless the game actually releases of course.
Here's my Power Fantasy: Node Sieges and Guild-v-Guild combat will probably evolve to hinge on a strategic resource, without which engaging in a war is doomed to failure. Top tier siege weapons, top-tier PVP potions, etc. These will require expert gatherers, processors, and crafters to produce. One of those three will be a bottleneck (I suspect Processing, since that's Freehold-bound) and whomever is able to control that bottleneck will in effect be the kingmakers on the server. Since they'll almost certainly be Artisan-skill focused players and not combat specialists, they won't be able to directly intervene, but they can encourage hardcore guilds to siege something down or whatever else with promise of the necessary resources to do it. I think that's pretty exciting and I hope that's possible within the structure of the game.
The way to combat excessive ganking is to make the world big enough and make distance matter so that it is fairly easy to avoid large groups if you are careful
Interesting video, I never thought about the social aspects of caravans. Especially the relationships between nodes and vassal nodes, should be interesting to see if that cooperation will exist in practice.
I saw the "The game doesn't exist" in really dark grey letters there at the end for a second... nice :)
Thank you for bringing up these points, I definitely agree that it's an issue. What really bothers me though is that even Margaret mentioned the issue explicitly to Steven on stream, his response wasn't exactly reassuring. He basically said, "yes, caravan drivers take risks." Like... Yes, we know. We're wondering what risks the ATTACKERS have.
I also think the mass-invite random group setting for these battles is a bad idea. How's a group of random players without coordinated voice communication supposed to decided in a short period of time before the defenders respawn whose caravan is going to make the new pickup and where it's going to go? How're you supposed to trust the person making the delivery to pay you out fairly when they're the only ones who can see all the contents and can't even fully unload or sell the goods right away after delivering? Who's to stop one or two people from cracking open all the crates as soon as the zergfest is over and ruining any chance of a caravan payout?
I agree that reputation will carry some weight, but we're talking about a massive game with thousands of players online at a time. All it takes is one or two people on the assault team that you didn't even organize to start cracking crates to ruin the raid for everyone who wanted to try and complete the delivery. I think player-driven-caravan PvP needs to be pre-made groups only with multiple attacking teams going up against each other and the defenders at the same time. That way, you can communicate effectively with, form plans with, and actually trust all the people you're grouped with.
Even then, we're still left with the issue of how attackers should take an equivalent amount of risk to the defenders, as well as how to limit the number of people allowed to attack the defenders if multiple attack groups are allowed... Tricky.
Best I can think of for the attacker limit is a soft cap. If there are spaces left below the soft cap, you can go up to five over with your group, but if the soft cap is reached or exceeded by any group, then you'll be rejected. So the max number of people you'll ever be attacked by will only be a full raid size give or take like 5 people. Any other group too big to join will be rejected with a message telling them the number of spots left below the max cap.
As for Risk v Reward, I think that the reputation argument can be made much, much better if we eliminate the random group dogpiling and instead require pre-mades for caravan attacks. That way the groups, who're most likely spearheaded by different guilds, can be held accountable.
Making Caravans too difficult to attack will destroy the system. Also if you're thinking about macro-wise (as Narc suggests), you'll want to defend those resources for protecting your node and attack other caravans from other nodes you wish to control in order to have a better time during node sieges.
Caravans = Attacker Advantage.
Nodes = Defender Advantage.
Balance.
Thank you for all the coverage and content. Also, if/when theres more info out, could you do another video on the planned crafting system? Heres to doing work that makes you happy 🍺🍻🍺
I appreciate you man!
I do plan to be an artisan main so, when we know more info about anything artisan related, I will be straight on it x
So from what I can tell the current design IS to allow pugs to smoothly group up, contend on either side, and part ways without any major restrictions to pure participation. This is less so when you have personal caravans, but seems to be the case for all of them. Now is this good? To have essentially mobile lobbies you can instantly join be you solo or premade? Maybe not, but I would like to get some more testing out of it. A few things I have noted however is that I do not like the "just run" viability of defenders on the caravan just rushing past attackers. I also agree that there seems to not be much risk for bandits during the attacking of a caravan.
However this might be countered by the fact that they are put in the same boat as the defenders if they do succeed in taking the caravan, meaning they will then have the same risk as the prior defenders to claim their rewards.
What I would like to see is a separate health bar for the horses, letting you attack and "knock them down" at 0% hp, halting the caravan until they are healed to a certain threshold. There should be tools available to the carriage to do this healing to some degree just in case there are no healers around. I feel this the best way to reduce the amount of "chase" fights as the combat doesn't seem too good on the move.
As the attackers, don't they risk all their gear from being flagged as aggressors?
Does this game have XP lose as well for repeat griefers?
People are looking at the caravan thing in too much of a vacuum. There are so many better things for players to be doing with their time on this game than trying to intercept caravans.
Also, since the whole point is to progress the nodes more so than just personal gain, there is less incentive to gank caravans in your own sphere of influence/kingdom. It’s more likely to sometimes try to interrupt trade in neighboring kingdoms, but due to travel time and effort it just isn’t the kind of thing where griefing will be out of control. Attacking other nodes is much more on the level of acceptable pvp practices than it is griefing. People who don’t follow ashes closely don’t understand the social aspects and social incentives of the game because there are no other games like it.
I like the idea working towards a common goal and other players can try to stop you, its like real life.
[ 0:15 ] Cats totally stole the show mate...brilliant! hahaha!
The answer at the end is such a nonnfricken answer... as he says "to answer that question," he, in fact, did not answer that question. And this isn't the first time he's done it. I like Steven, but he is avoiding the topic and this question entirely.
The outcome is yet to be seen, but all of us who've played every game this is being modeled after knows that implementing a pure risk vs reward structure doesn't work.... specifically when only one side is taking on the risk. If this isn't addressed we can all sadly watch this game die, because without the proper systems in place and balancing the systems they have it will not succeed no matter how much we or they want it to.
that is what Steven is best at :)
My biggest concern with the emphasis on the sociality of the game is the invasion of massive communities that will inevitably have the biggest footholds on launch. Yeah, it is engrained into the mechanics that you will want to incentivize your node to progress by being a place other want to come to. But what if you already have a community of 1000+ that are ALREADY there? Where is the risk in that community? Streamers like Asmon, Shroud, Tyler1, and many others already have a fanbase that will do just about anything they say. And on the guild recruitment forums there are massive guilds planning to monopolize nodes or guild castles. How is Intrepid giving those communities a 'risk" when they can zerg through every risk and obtain the most rewards?
The counter argument:
It would be wrong to say that there should be a punishment or a ball&chain on people who have worked really hard to build up their own community and want to play a game with them. I myself would like to have a guild for this game that quite literally doesn't exist so that I too can enjoy the rewards with my friends and have a foothold in a space of the game. It would be very unreasonable for the community to shut down my attempts at such and to shut down the successful growth of other communities. One of the ways people battle risk is through corporation and working together to achieve a common goal, whether that group is massive or a few people should be irrelevant
In short
Eventually, a community is going to become so big that there is no risk, but is that something that Intrepid needs to manage?
A lot of people will gather around a streamer to be part of something greater, but it will also attract people who will play bandit and try to focus all the fanboy.
Seems a little too easy to destroy a caravan, if the attackers can just spawn in their own caravan afterwards and drive off with it...
I sure hope we get pve servers
No such thing in AoC. The whole point of Ashes is risk vs reward. No risk in PvE.
@LiriusPvP this is sawmanUK, he's a CC and has made several videos against the pve crowd. He's being cheeky
i also noticed the gold only went to the person that sold the items from the caravan
"The risk is the unknown" ... except my KNOW that attackers have zero risk lol
A massive issue I had with the game was the rock paper scissors combat (as explained). There is nothing more infuriating than being unable to outplay. I hope it isn't as how they describe. Sometimes requiring your content to be too socially focused can be to the detriment of players.
Instead of 15 guild members protecting a Caravan of a trader, won’t the guild just use those 15 individuals to move the goods via their inventory? Probably faster as well
Caravans can carry 100x as much as players. Gunna need a bigger guild :p
I think what we primarily need are incentives for defenders to engage in defending the "kingdom" they inhabit.
I could easily see myself travelling through the realm I call home and defending caravans for days. Its just a nice fantasy and sounds like fun for people who like pvp.
But if thats a net negative, because I can't even cover my repair costs by defending poor bastards for free who cannot afford mercs, then that will have its limits.
I don't struggle to imagine some node faction who has special rewards for stuff like that though.
UO was a griefer's paradise, and was ultimately why I left it. Getting ganked every 3 minutes stopped being fun after a while. Great game otherwise, though. Stuck with it for 2 years.
Bounty hunters gonna be eating good in this game
I can see guilds getting rep as corrupt hunters and caravan guards. Or even as flank guards on dungeon/raid.
Imagine getting paid gold to watch the back of another guild attempting a world boss? The potential for new style of game play with ashes is so exciting
YESSSSS 😁
I know a question like that was asked but I forget what the answer was. Will there be an option to banish a player from a node? That could be one way to dispose of highwaymen in your own node. So that their risk of loosing is them wasting shit loads of time respawning at their own node and running back to their hunting grounds.
In eve online which is basically a fast travel simulator that is a valid form of discouragement for null sec gankers. Also implementing gear loss and exp vamp would be a good way to make the stakes higher for gankers. And successfully defending a caravan would be rewarding beyond just the fun of winning in PVP.
This is one thing I also thought about during this video. If there is a way that your actions hurt your own node, it will be exploited by players. Just send a large group of people to a rival node at sabotage it, easy.
The node system is not going to stop caravan ganking. The nodes get xp from adventurers questing. The Caravan does not help nor hinder that. I feel you believe that people will be more likely to quest in areas where a large guild/group is patrolling and repelling Caravan attacks, but there is nothing saying a guild like that would be in power in any major node. The only node type that holds elections is the Scientific type.
People worried about caravans have never played Null Sec in Eve Online. 40% mining and industry, 20% combat, and 40% getting to and from Jita. And we developed strategies to get there safely.
Rogue & rangers are going to be in high demand. Imagine, playing a Ranger class and doing ranger activities. Unheard of!!
Sorta unrelated but does anyone know if theres other pvp related sorts of activities besides caravans? Things that have this "no corruption gained" type stuff. The other one I am aware of is the castle sieges.
Like in totality we got: PvE (grinding, world bosses), gathering, caravans, castle sieges. Am I missing things?
Make attacker not able to revive for 2h once they die in the raid can also be something . Then people will think before attacking everything they see on the map .
I can't wait for this, would be cool as hell to start a Merchant Marine guild to manage these issues.
What is lootable on death in pvp? All of your gear? Only bag contents? Only coin? Nothing?
anything that is considered "a gathering material" which goes specifically into your "gathering bag" and, you only drop a % of it, not all x
there's also some more indepth info but I won't get too deep into it x
hope this helps x
Simple solution, give attackers and all gear a Value based on market prices (or whatever) you need that many coins in your bag to attack and not lose any gear, otherwise you drop gear in the intended value but rounded up. risk/reward achieved.
You’d think that with the caravan it would buff everyone making it more like a boss fight.
To be fair I would not consider this hardcore pvp at all this is akin to say Archeage if you want true hardcore pvp that would be Eve online,Albion online, Darkfall and probably more mmo's out there I can't think of atm
Mhmm
This game is either going to be a moderate success or a complete failure. I really don't see it going any other way. I think the concept of the game is awesome, and I think the target audience they're aiming it at will never have the time to dedicate to it to make the game work as intended .... not for very long. There'll be an awesome honeymoon period for six months to a year post launch and then people will start feeling the grind. And one day you'll log in and lose your stuff due to being ganked by some group of fools and that don't care about anything like node building or what not, they're just out to ruin someone's day. And you'll quit the game, maybe not forever but for a month, three .. a year ..... meaning a player that was building the game world as intended has left. Multiply yourself by 100K. And after the griefers can't find that many people to piss off .... guess what they do .... times that by 100K. Suddenly a game that NEEDS constant player interaction to make its systems function has intended isn't working as intended. That leads to frustration and Schmoe X quits ..... times that by 100K.
I wonder if somehow it wouldn't be raw force that would be required to defend the caravan... like in the real world, if you can hold off a criminal long enough, they will be fearful of capture or the authorities coming. I'm not saying going as far as having invincible NPC guards spawn in or something but, ya know... I dunno, some additional meter or something that, depending upon certain conditions, would give the caravan a slight edge in the struggle for the goods. I dunno.
Hmm yeah it could tie into nodes maybe.. a strong node is going to have better "defensive" capabilties, etc... I dunno.
Maybe mercenary groups could help defend and somehow be hidden ON THE CARAVAN... i.e. by visual inspection the caravan may look easy to overtake, lightly defended, etc... but out jump a badass high level mercenary group.
@12:15 ok so if my caravan is going to be valuable, I better invest even more resources to provision it increasing the risk even more for reasons. I need to bring as many people as possible to guard against the gankers or even hire mercenary guilds BUT I also need to make sure information is restricted to a CLOSE circle of friends who all happen to be online at the 'unique' time I chose to launch the caravan to avoid as many people online as possible, good thing none of us have jobs or other real life obligations. Got it, easy-peasy. A great answer to the question "how will risk vs. reward be balanced for both the caravan attackers and defenders". It'll be fine.
you also need to somehow pay all these people you bring along to defend you :)
I agree, that having a black market/fence will rather be detrimental to a node unless it is used very frequently. That would mean though, that there are a lot of thieves/highwaymen/robbers in that area and honest merchants avoiding it.
That also leads to robber raids having to travel further to find caravans and having to travel a long way back to the home node(more risk of being raided themselves).
One more thing you didn't mention is the sheer size of the map. So many wannabe thieves dream of the outlaw life of robbing one caravan after the other and swimming in gold. I rather see groups of thuglifers being bored in the woods while waiting for a caravan to come by and if one appears, being to scared to attack because the defenders look too strong. Big raids waiting for prey are easy to spot and you only need one post in area chat to spoil the spoils.
One more thing, we haven't heard about much is the bounty hunter system. I don't think, it will necessarily be only tied to the corruption system. Wouldn't make much sense. Killing corrupted is already easy and rewarding in itself. You don't get corruption from attacking a caravan, but they never said that there will be no penalty at all. You might get a bounty on your head, that reveals the general area, where you're at. If you keep robbing, it might even reveal your exact location. So the risk for a successful attack, might be, that you have an assassin on your heels for a week. I mean, it would make sense. Who has bounties on their head? Killers? Thieves? Highwaymen?
People seriously underestimate how personal reputation is going to affect the player base. This isn't wow where you can ninja loot or open world pvp and then random queue into a bg or raid wothout any repercussion.
It seems like it will be kingdom vs kingdom, but i also expect that there may be a lot of guilds that will travel far beyond their neighbors borders to just scout around and find caravans to raid, possibly in lower level nodes as to not piss off those with too much influence.
Will the game be released this year?
The problem with this caravan PvP event is: Either you show up with a large clan and protect the caravan. All the attackers see, that there are sitting 50+ people on the caravan and protect it, so they don't engage into it, when they are severely outnumbered. In this scenario 50+ people are doing nothing for several hours until the caravan reaches its destination.
Or some other large clan sees this loot piñata and shows up with 100+ people and just curb stomp the guarding clan. For maximum moral damage, they wait for as long as possible and stop the caravan close to its target location and then just break open the chests to ruin the whole thing. (and I'm not pulling this out of my ass, I've witnessed drama like this in other MMOs. There's a lot of people that get a lot of fun out of just ruining other peoples days. Literally mindset of "ruin fun for others" > "in game profits")
So the protector will basically always have a frustrating game experience. Either they get to experience maximum boring guarding with no action. Or they will probably get curb stomped by a much larger attacker after having "wasted" a lot of time with guarding the caravan. Or did I miss some overarching mechanic, that'll prevent these scenarios from being the prime PvP caravan experience?
----------------------
Fun fact: In human history battles were rarely fought with similar soldier numbers. Usually it was a slaughtering where one side had many more men than the other. So this behaviour is very natural, smart and makes a lot of sense. But as most of the time "real life logic stuff" doesn't translate into fun game play in a virtual world space.
-----------------------
I hope our @Narc reads this and will give his opinion on it.
This is what Alpha2 balancing is for. If caravans aren't getting through, you make them stronger, or you have attackers have a chance to drop gear on death.
I spent a lot of time in Archeage walking across the map in stealth carrying a single pack at a time just to get my character strong enough to hold his own against average players... then I joined a guild with a bunch of absolutely mental aussies who were amazing -- and all we did was try to ruin the pack transfers of the biggest whale on the server.
If it's always on pvp it will be unplayable for most people and it will die
i love risk v reward so much (i played alot of albion) that i forgot that there might be a reward. My motto: Kerngedanke, REIN! - Core tought, GOING IN! Often spent millions on top quality gear that would make gankers straight up nut when they see me for pvp, only to jump into the masses to drop my dmg and come out of the quick engage with my nutsack missing.
Wouldnt the most likely attackers be from a different node and so suffer none of the penalties?
From archeage experience you have to consider time.
As a bandit you invest time sitting on the roadside waiting for caravans.
This time you could use for something else like farming gear, gathering resources etc.
Your risk is wasting your time if no caravan comes or the caravans that come are defended to good.
Don't forget, that the attackers won't always win and that having 5+ people sit on the side of a road for maybe hours isn't that much fun for most people.
Yes, plus the harder caravan are to move around, the more valuable ressources becomes, so there is an equilibrium at which taking the risk is worth for defenders
As I walk up the hills and to the caravan they defend
I take a look at them and realize they wont mend
'Cause I've been grindin' and expin' so long that
Even my momma thinks that my real life is gone
And I always crossed a man that didn't deserve it
Me be treated like a pker, ya know, that's how I serve 'em
You better watch out in which area of Verra you step and walkin'
Or you and your homies might be end up in a chair like Stephen Hawkin'
I really like to grief, and you wont stay loc
As they croak, I see myself and my arrows smoke
Fool, I'm the kinda PKer the little noobies wanna be like
Going out in the night, you wont see me even under the brightest streetlight
Tell me why are they so blind to see
That the ones we hurt are them by me?
Been spendin' most their lives
Livin' in a griefers' paradise
Been spendin' most their lives
Livin' in a griefers' paradise
Keep spendin' most our lives
Livin' in a griefers' paradise
Keep spendin' most our lives
Livin' in a griefers' paradise
There should be some risk to the bandits, otherwise it's just free loot. When someone knows a cavaran is coming, they'll just write in chat and the whole zone will go there, what is the caravan owner supposed to do against that many people... spend all the potential profit on bodyguard? And he might still not have enough people show up to escort than the amount of bandits you could gather.
This is why I hope travel or more specifically logistics will be an actual obstacle for this. Doesn't matter if everyone knows, if the caravan reaches the goal 10 min before every bandit arrives. Same reason I hope there's nothing like a global chat. Information flows should be restricted by the game, even if discord and co are an option. They cannot be everywhere.
I strongly disagree with global chat in mmorpg
My opinion, just as I wrote in another place: it doesn't make any sense.
I don't really have a problem with the caravan system.
There's something that, as I see it, nobody is taking into account: time and expectations.
Unless you have a spy, there's no way to know when a caravan is departing and what valuables it has.
Are you telling me that I'll be wasting time, hours or days waiting for a caravan to pass who knows where, just to attack it?
I beg your pardon but it doesn't make sense at all.
This is a huge risk: wasted time for an empty or not valuable caravan or impossible to attack because it's stronger than my team.
The caravan system is fine as it is.
Time for some decoy Caravans
Gonna drop the karma at least for days with no chance to recover it
More concerned how easy its going to be to make people pay real money for raid positions. You will pay or wait to be in my raid group for sure
they need incentives for randoms to join either attacking or defending without being part of a premade raid. if it's going to be a dynamic pvp event, the game itself needs to reward players for defending, not the players
So whats the risk for the attackers now?
Social MMO, yep. I hope that non-English-speaking players will be able to find what they're looking for with dedicated servers (German-speaking, French-speaking, Spanish-speaking, etc.).
Thanks Narc keep up the good work
You didnt touch on corruption AT ALL. which is a game main feature of initiating pvp in open world zones that are not the ocean.
Because there is no corruption involved with the caravans :) It is a PVP intended gameplay loop
that's why
@@Narc I have read the wiki a long time ago (yeah the whole damn thing D: ) and i honestly dont remember that. BUT I DO KNOW, you know what youre speaking about so I will take your word at face value. Would be interesting to see some type of risk for the attackers failing in the attack though.... other wise it will be a greifable constant for that LOOP. (*this isnt the ONLY griefable system in the game. you will also have people griefing harvestable nodes that may require aging that has a ultra rare mat for a endgame crafting.... that will be a issue im sure)
I love how Steven didn't answer the question at the end of the video at all, so i guess that means there is no risk for the attackers and this is going to be a griefers paradise...
Crybaby. How about you get a group of friends? I literally already invited like 30 people to join me and some guild ingame so we can fight bandits and protect our loot, meanwhile you're crying about it. It's a social MMO. This isn't WoW or FF. Solo players are doomed. Start being social. Talk to people, get yourself into a clan and form a group of players like you so you can have fun with the game. Whining does nothing.
This game will die fast if griefing is encouraged and not punished.
Top guilds using caravans. Even if you put a high risk for attackers of caravans, that will only hurt smaller guilds. The Top guilds will only fear other top guilds or the masses. Same when it comes to owning a node. People will have to hope for "Top" guilds to be helpful, not only for themselves. You will most likely see a lot of Union being made to balance things out. The beginning of the game will madness and cut throat. Which i truly enjoy the most lol
you can juggle as many bullshit mechanics to "balance" the game, but with a system like this the only way both sides have a risk and meaningful consequences is with perma death. honor and social systems will be exploited, anyone that has played mmo's for a few years knows this
if world of warcraft had a system where you lose gear/resources when killed by other players it would have been doa
I'll admit, this peaked my interest.
"can a node with toxic players succeed?" YES, because everyone will join that faction and whoever doesnt will quit the game, and after a few weeks without people to grief they will quit themselves
seriously man, havent you played mmos for the last 10 years?
big streamers will create factions that dominate their server, and anyone against them will get stomped. their world will be law for their simp army and if they decide "hey, lets fuck with this guy until he quits" it shall be done
nope, because MMOs have been dogshit for the last 10 years
Would would I, The Joker, care about anyone receiving any benefits?
I'm going to Darth Vader and Palpatine my server. Lots of people want to join the Empire
Been spending most of our lives living in a griefer's paradise
Solutions for caravan system and maybe future griefs
There is no way a guild is active 24/7 and also there is no way every one can bring ppl to protect his Caravan so this system is usefull only for big organised guilds, most of the people playing mmos are not part of Big organised guilds and many of them want to log in after a day of hard work to do some stuff and relax.
so.
1. Caravan system using few of Silkroads rules set(first caravan system in mmos)
Not all caravans are attackable for expample if you are a solo player trying to make a small profit by buying and selling via caravan a small amount of goods the system protects you.
players can not attack small value caravans , this system protects you from griefers and trolls . Now if you create a caravan with high value items then you better get your self some protection
2. the Caravan raid event
i personally i like this pug event.
there can be 2 type of caravans
A. guild run caravan( when a guild can fill a raid -invite only type)
B.Public Caravan (free to join as long as there are spots left)
To make it work the reward for defenders must be lucrative also both attackers and defenders have to get a debuff so they cant switch sides
or steal goods as defender and attackers join the defenders
Both debuffs have to last until the event ends
. Events like this must be 2 raid limited once full cant participate or attack someone. Event ends only when Caravan is fullfiled.
Defenders get the defend reward,
Attackers split the stolen goods rewards among all raid members plus attack reward.
Attackers get a 24h debuff and they cant become attackers to another caravan, but they can participate as defenders.
The beauty of social sandbox is that it's self correcting.
If a bunch of people are camping trade routes in groups, guess what, a second group will form and wipe them in predictable areas. Or the node will become shunned by traders and people will go elsewhere, which will result in the guild controlling the adjacent node/s will loose influence. So it's actually in the management's best interest to help traders in most cases. This will all spark PvP which is the whole point of the caravans being the "kickstarter" of the chain reaction of open world content.