What challenges should guild alliances face?
-
@Jetah said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:
the gods are always watching. i consider Karma a system of the gods.
I think there should be karma and reputation, in that case. Karma being your morality base on the opinions of the gods, and reputation, what the public think of you
A merchant may have a good business on the outside, but fences items for thieves on the side
A bartender may sell information from drunken guards leading to valuable wares.
To other players and npc they have a good reputation as they have not been caught, but karma system may be accumulation of negative points for example
-
i'd like to see Tartaros having a corruption place, a place where good aligned players cant enter except to be killed. make it similar to the beast planet. it really pisses me off that so many benefits are on the high karma side.
-
A few conclusions:
Friendly fire
This is what I want to see:
- Arboreus: PvE without friendly fire
- Syndesia: PvP without friendly fire
- Tartaros: PvP with friendly fire
Imposing friendly fire on Syndesia would remove a significant choice from the game, and "disenfranchise" a significant number of players.
Collisions
While I understand the desire for player-to-player collisions (more realism and immersion), collisions are expensive to develop and model. Consider, if you will, an Albion Online reset day with thousands of players zerging. AO does -not- have player-to-player collisions, but what if it did?
The servers suddenly have a great deal more work to do: tracking collisions between every last player across the world, notifying clients of legal movements, and being notified of proposed movements that must now be verified against other moving objects. That would only make the lag issues in AO worse, and imagine what lag would do in -that- situation!
Furthermore, while I understand the argument to allow collisions on even one world for the sake of choice, in this case, I see it as an all-or-nothing proposition. Why? Because every weapon, every skill, every attribute should be expected to behave differently in collision-based combat versus non-collision-based combat.
The developers would thus have to balance everything against two very different combat systems, and that would be a nightmare.
So, my vote (if it matters to the developers at all), is against player-to-player collisions.
Conclusion
Arboreus is PvE, and Tartaros is no-holds-barred, anything-goes PvP. Syndesia, however, is the balance between the two, the neutral world between good and evil. It should not be surprising if Syndesia winds up with a significant number of PvE-like protections in its PvP.
At that, limited PvP -is- possible via invasion on Arboreus, and demons get periodic free invasions of Syndesia, thus the balance of the world of Fractured is already tipped in favor of PvP.
It doesn't need to be tipped further.
-
Though many of us disagree with some of the proposed mechanics, the upshot is that we all seem to be in consensus that it should be very difficult for guilds, alliances, and other orgs to project and maintain power and that the devs should do as much as possible to avoid the boring, crippling status quo that plagues other games like Albion Online most recently.
-
I like the idea that the more you have the more things cost you.
If a guild has multiple territories, resource plots, etc.. what have you.. they cost more to feed. In AO you feed territories, it's always seemed so obvious to me.. but SBI never went down that path. If you increase the maintenance costs, then things will find a balance. Guilds will determine what amount of effort they can afford. Same applies to alliances.. The more subjects aligned, the more it costs to exist. Be it food, items by value, or outright currency.. there should be scaling costs associated with growth. dynamic costs proportionate to size.
By implementing systems like this, the developers would introduce passive checks and balances to the open world.. They could tweak these variables as need be to impact the world and it's events. They could even take it a step further and intentionally impact the open world, food shortages.. natural disasters.. Spinning up the economy in different ways as time goes on to keep things interesting.. keeping players engaged.
-
Yeah guilds should have taxes on stuff they own, and larger the guild, larger the taxes, but only from certain number of players upwards.
Example:
guild with 10 players - taxes are 10%
guild with 50 players - taxes are 10% (but its more cash cus more people have more stuff)
guild with 100 players - taxes 10% (but even more cash cus more stuff)guild with 400 players - taxes are 25% (difficult and costly, but not impossible)
guild with 1000 players - taxes are 75% (unbearable)These numbers are only just an examples, just show principle how taxes percentage would rise beyond certain number of people in guild. This would set the so called "soft cap" on guild member number.
Number of members where taxes should start to rise in percentage, and how much this percentage would be, is of course point of discussion, and in the end dev choice. But this is one of the ways how to not limit guild member number by hard mechanical limitation, but still add a "soft cap" to discourage guilds rise beyond certain point.
-
I’m open to a few hard mechanical caps, but I share @Gothix’s view that what would be better is strong mechanical and social deterrents.
In Albion, large guilds sidestep the member cap by creating overflow guilds. Oftentimes the overflow guild shares the same name as the first guild but it has a 2 on it.
We don’t wanna make it impossible for larger guilds to exist and function, we just wanna make sure that they’re sufficiently challenged so that they can’t just sweep the board as they did in Albion and other games.
-
@Gothix Yeah, taxes are fine, but i hope Fractured will not allowed that large guilds. Large guilds = zerging in open areas.
I hope there will be some normal cap, like 100 players, not 1000
-
@Fortie said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:
@Gothix Yeah, taxes are fine, but i hope Fractured will not allowed that large guilds. Large guilds = zerging in open areas.
I hope there will be some normal cap, like 100 players, not 1000How would you have them deal with overflow guilds?
-
I suspect direct caps (soft or hard) won't have the intended effect. Rather, guilds will police their members harder, to only recruit the best players (a metric of skill + activity, among other things).
This means that the best players will naturally gravitate towards guilds with the best players, and even though guild sizes may be relatively similar, a few guilds will still dominate.
-
@Alexian said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:
How would you have them deal with overflow guilds?
Specially when people are arguing against friendly fire.
Large guilds would just make 10 smaller guilds and play together. Not worrying about zerging when friendly fire doesn't exist.
-
I don't think friendly fire would matter that much, not with how the Fractured map is structured. You'd simply need to coordinate guilds to varying useful positions (presumably you're fighting over a point on the map, a dungeon, rare resource, town, something, which provides a context for positioning).
In other words, each guild army would be occupying different ground, perhaps flanking the enemy, blocking retreat, locking down the enemy in a firefight while another guild maneuvers, etc.
Guilds that could do that would have a huge advantage, friendly fire or not.
-
World of Tanks is an example of hard caps not preventing guild domination. Been a while since I played, but this is what I remember:
- Clans could have a maximum of 100 members
- No in-game alliances between clans
Despite those restrictions, a few top clans dominated clan wars, taking most of the valuable territory. Why? Their recruitment requirements were extremely high, and the top players crowded to those few clans. No one else could compete with them.
Furthermore, the top clans often wound up in de facto alliances/ceasefires, once they had carved up the map to their liking.
I'll add that's one reason I like unrestricted, zerg-based warfare: it encourages guilds to recruit everyone, not just the best, and provides opportunities for new players to hop right in.
-
@Alexian Mmm.. if there will not be alliances, then it's easy ... But with alliances ... i really don't know
-
One other way to deter zerging is to tie the rewards to single (winning) guild only, and not shareable in any way.
I will add an example for siege zerging below (overflow guilds), but other methods could be devised to deter zerging in other situations, in some similar way.
For example guild that wins siege does not get gold (or similar rewards that result in directly earning you gold) as reward (gold is simply shared to other guilds that helped with the siege). Siege should be rewarded with something that's bound to character (those characters who were in the guild at the time siege was won*).
In this way, even if 2000 people help, only 200 people that were in the winning guild will only actually be rewarded, and rest 1800 have absolutely nothing from this. Because ALL rewards that winning the siege involve, were bound to those 200 characters somehow.
What kind of rewards that should be is discussable, I can give some examples.
-
only those 200 characters get an ability to set their houses in special locations (that are activated and available only to those that were in the guild at the time siege was won*)
-
only those 200 characters get special tax free status (every other player auto pays taxes, by game mechanics auto taking extra cash from him, and only those 200 players are ignored by mechanics)
-
only those 200 players get special treatmant by NPCs in that zone
-
only those 200 players get special options available to them in that zone
-
only those 200 players have an ability to get political positions in this zone
Now those are just an examples, but the point is that only the people that were the part of a winning guild at the time the siege was won (both part of the guild at the time siege is won AND and 1 month part of the guild before that), get those rewards, that are tied to their characters.
*I added this one month clause so guilds wouldn't just invite 2000 players right before the siege, and kick them after to avoid taxes.
-
-
I would like to suggest another thing (for those areas where friendly fire will be a thing).
If there will be no guild based immunity, I would suggest let guild organisation UI, allow to organize people within a guild into "families".
Allow guilds to have any number of guild members (with optionally including those soft cap mechanics), but limit family size to up to 10 people (size of 2 parties?).
Every player within a guild would be treated mechanically equally in anything connected to guild, and families would just be tied to friendly fire mechanics.
Family members would be immune to each other for friendly fire (regardless of party status), and they wouldn't be immune to friendly fire from rest of guild members.
That would incentivise creating of small tactical teams for organized combat, so guilds that place an effort in being better organized and trained could benefit from this option when group fighting is involved.
-
Another effect of guild restrictions is stasis. That is, if you punish expansion attempts, you will get fewer of them, leading to what happened in World of Tanks: clan territorial contentment, and a lack of large-scale action.
And that can happen even if there is no single dominant guild/alliance. World of Tanks and Albion attempt to mitigate that problem by having seasons, resets, and relatively easy takeover of territory, but I don't think that will work in the design of Fractured.
Wurm Online tried to break up stasis with a regular world challenge (the Hunt of the Ancients), but to me that felt contrived and obvious: it didn't fit a kingdom-level political storyline.
I wonder if the real lure of expansion will be control of scarce resources on limited areas of the continents. If so, however, that risks a snowball effect (once a guild controls the resource, they can leverage it to become more powerful, and thus expand to control more).
Bottom line: I think I'd like to see guilds constantly wanting to expand, and trying to, but mostly failing.
-
I think a simple way to stop zergs, the more people bunched together the more likely a horror will spawn that attacks everyone in its path, killiable but unpredictable jumpy smashy hard to lure, and will fight big clumps of people, will add a bit of chaos to guild vs guild pvp
-
But I -like- zergs.
And in Fractured, I suspect they will be hard to assemble, since the territory is so huge.
-
@Xzoviac said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:
I think a simple way to stop zergs, the more people bunched together the more likely a horror will spawn that attacks everyone in its path, killiable but unpredictable jumpy smashy hard to lure, and will fight big clumps of people, will add a bit of chaos to guild vs guild pvp
Almost like the Thresher Maw from Mass Effect or some such.
