Feature Spotlight - Seasons
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Hello adventurers!
It's time for a brand new Feature Spotlight!
Today we'll be covering the Seasons, the upcoming content for Fractured Online!Not the seasons you might expect!
Will you take on the new challenges?
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This could be good, this could be bad.
I have no problems with the siege system as is (other than the clear bugs and exploits). But removing the adjacent restriction seems like a bad idea to me.
By removing the adjacent restriction on Sieges you allow zerg or grief groups (like bussy) to wantonly destroy other towns for no reason other than they can. This means that despite the promise of having 3 continents and towns spread out there is no way way to distance yourself and protecting a town from a heavily hostile group is left with one option: pre-emptively destroy them, and most likely through constant battles and attrition.
I would like to hear what albion veterans have to say on this change.The rest of the proposition seems great. Giving players of all types credit towards improving the guild ranking is a wonderful inclusive decision.
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I guess that there is one clarification needed in order to understand exactly the impact of this.
In the bugfixes of the last patch there was an indication about guilds being able to conquer hamlets. Is this true also for cities? Only hamlets will be valid targets? Because in that case then it looks very nice. An hamlet is something easy enough to replace that it can be conquered every season without many issues on the players, but if you risk losing your rank 15 city every start of season, then things could be a bit too hardcore for many.
I guess that we will have to wait for details on the new conquering system before fully assessing what this means.
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Or better yet, once a large guild gets its fingers into everything, who will oppose them? If you don't join the #1 guild, prepare to be destroyed. Even if they don't own the entire continent, it wouldn't be hard to keep a boot pressed against other guilds throats if they don't comply. This isn't an anime or real world with consequences, once a guild gets too strong...there wont be a way to stop them.
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Here is an important question I have about the balance of city relics - will the relics be given for the next 1 season or will they be ETERNAL?
I just finished translating this news into Russian and it was said in the news that "buffs are unique" - logically, this means that they are one of a kind, but over time the same guild can acquire all the city relics (hypothesis) and this means that only it will be interesting for new players (most of them). It follows from this that the mechanics of urban relics should last for one or several seasons, and then they should just break down so that there is a balance in these relics and there is an incentive to compete
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Seasens are a brilliant idea to finally bring life into the game. I think the whole thing is very well thought out, but I have a question. Many guild members many points is automatically the winner? Or do small guilds 20-50 players have the same conditions as the big ones. Are points awarded as a percentage of guild size?
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Looks like a cool idea, bot killing and balance will be key in making this successful.
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Bots will hardly be an issue on this game.
Balance instead will indeed need to receive a good amount of attention.
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@spoletta said in Feature Spotlight - Seasons:
Bots will hardly be an issue on this game(...)
Because nobody's playing this game, or why would bots not be a problem?
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@Logain There are different reasons:
- The game offers hardly any lucrative incentives to bot, as important resources spawn every few hours and these are contested when games are more dense.
- There are red players who will farm the bots.
- There are game masters who will ban bots, which as a result of the game being buy-to-play makes it even less lucrative.
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@LordSkykal said in Feature Spotlight - Seasons:
(...)The game offers hardly any lucrative incentives to bot(...)
There's several, from rabbit paws to ore, from mandrake to legendary summoning materials.
@LordSkykal said in Feature Spotlight - Seasons:
(...)There are red players who will farm the bots(...)
As elaborated and explained several times before, this doesn't work well on Syndesia and not at all on Arboreus.
@LordSkykal said in Feature Spotlight - Seasons:
(...)There are game masters who will ban bots(...)
No offense to you, but I doubt in the ability to determine a well written bot.
A stupid simple macro, sure, no problem. A dedicated bot? How do you tell that from a young, non native speaking, real player with the currently available tools?
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First of all, the fact that only a well written bot is even usable (no targeting and a few other issues), already cuts quite a bit the bot users.
Second, any area which is exploitable by bots, is also necessarily one where players are likely to pass, especially ore nodes. This already means good chances of being PKed, but mostly means that it is very likely that one shoots a message in Discord and a GM intervenes. Since the game is buy to play and niche, the cost to reward is simply not worth it.
What MUST be changed because it is potentially dangerous in this regard, is fixed (and visible) respawn times on resources.
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@LordSkykal Your statement may be partly true for Syndesia. What about Arboreus? Do red players farm the bots there too? And the resources there are said to be very popular in some cases.
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@spoletta said in Feature Spotlight - Seasons:
(...)no targeting and a few other issues(...)
I'm not sure how 'no targeting' is supposed to be an issue, or what these other 'few issues' should be.
The implementation details certainly vary depending on the route you're taking (ML/GOAP/BT/state machine) and if you're directly grabbing the datastream, or if you're working on the graphical interface, but so far I haven't stumbled across any potential issues.@spoletta said in Feature Spotlight - Seasons:
(...)This already means good chances of being PKed, but mostly means that it is very likely that one shoots a message in Discord and a GM intervenes
You can't have it both ways, you're going to have to settle for one.
If the amount of playerkilling is high enough to scare of a bot user, who can simply run their bot in the background 24/7 with no additional effort, then you're going to have scared of hundreds or even thousands of less enduring normal players who got killed over and over again.
And how would they know they are up to a bot? Just rotate though the 3-5 character slots randomly at random interval, assign them to random tasks. If anything Fractured is the perfect game to run a bot, because there's sooo much you can bot, it is so easy to get to a point where the bot can be self sustaining and there's no ways of direct communication.
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Cool news
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@Logain the "other issues" are food (easily solved), rest (not so easily solved) and whatever the random effects of weather will be.
Now, you clearly have coding knowledge and can think of some high grade bot that can solve all this and is impossible to distinguish from a player, but it simply isn't a realistic case. We are all quite experienced players, and have met many bots in many games. Our experience tells us that It was always extremely obvious that they were botting. It isn't hard at all to distinguish them. They will get reported and banned in a short manner. No game with a rapid response from staff has ever had issues with bots, especially a buy to play one, where every ban costs money.
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@spoletta said in Feature Spotlight - Seasons:
(...)Our experience tells us that It was always extremely obvious that they were botting(...)
Well, maybe we simply have different experience there.
@spoletta said in Feature Spotlight - Seasons:
(...)It isn't hard at all to distinguish them(...)
So, please, go ahead and answer the question you dodged.
How do you tell a bot from a young, non native speaking, real player with the currently available tools?
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I think I have indirectly answered that question but I will be more specific.
They are obvious. Bots show a completely different behaviour from players. It isn't something on the macro level, but very evident on the micro level. Apparently unneded micro waiting times, very repetitive intervals between skills... there's a lot of these behaviours which on a whole makes the actions of a bot feel unnatural to a player.
Also, if a GM wants to check if a player is a bot, it has multiple very easy ways (which I will not list for obvious reasons).
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@spoletta said in Feature Spotlight - Seasons:
(...)feel unnatural to a player(...)
I guess we simply have different standings when it comes to that, I never really liked 'feelings' to be involved when there are serious consequences to false positives.
@spoletta said in Feature Spotlight - Seasons:
(...)it has multiple very easy ways (which I will not list for obvious reasons).
Yes, mysterious black magic, something else I don't really believe in
And at that point, I'm going to leave the discussion with a shrug.
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umm.. can we get real seasons, because as you said " not the seasons we were thinking" except it was. so do you but can you also give use actual seasons?
