Posts made by Roccandil

Actually, what if friendly fire were up to the players? That is, you could have AoE stances: wild versus controlled. Wild AoE would do more damage, but damage everything, whereas controlled would do less damage, but only damage enemies.

@Bardikens

Enabling friendly fire on Tartaros makes sense, since it's supposed to be the free-for-all planet, but due to the griefing possibilities it represents, I'd be much more leery of enabling it on Syndesia.

@Alexian

Looks like owning territory requires town claims. Since town houses count as claims (and each account only gets one per planet), guilds may have a hard time claiming free house plots outside town territories, since they'll need to focus on the towns.

Controlling the territory is another thing entirely: I rather expect small claims next to a major guild city to be subject to the guild's wishes (except on Arboreus), since they'll be able to send out squads to harass claim owners.

Also, I don't expect towns to change ownership easily in Fractured, unlike Albion.

@Alexian said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:

@Roccandil said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:

@Alexian

Logistics! One thing Albion does do is force alliances to pick a realmgate to access the black zone, while also making certain areas more valuable than others. They also seem to be trying to make alts less effective at circumventing that restriction, by making more GvGs for territory take place at the same time.

AO's attempts to offer smaller alliances opportunity to rise through the ranks have been... honestly, quite lackluster. During my last run, which was April - June 2019, my guild was part of TBI, a newer alliance sponsored by SUN. We did extremely well... but mostly because of a hired mercenary GvG team. Once they left, we lost all 34 territories in the span of a week or two and the whole thing more or less unraveled.

Ya, I was part of TBI when that happened. Highlights how important GvG teams are versus zergs! A huge zerg won't do you any good unless you have a GvG team to back it up.

The effect seems to be that the top alliances compete for the best areas, leaving room for up and coming alliances to compete for the less valuable regions.

The realmgate addition has certainly helped, but not very much. It's been my experience that it was a case of too little, too late. Outside of repelling mage raids for siphoned energy and showing up during territory reset, there's little maintenance involved in holding territory, so alliances are free to sweep the countryside with little to stop them. And in many case, many of the major alliances have nonaggression pacts so they don't have to try to compete with one another.

Hmm. That hasn't been experience since TBI, but my current alliance is in the newer area, and competition seems to be good there. (By good, I mean at least it exists between two alliances!)

"Room" is relative, of course; I think Fractured will have a lot more of it, and I'm hoping the logistics of covering that much space will make it difficult to project power.

Yes, that's my hope as well! That logistics, maintenance, and geography will be far more daunting challenges in Fractured than AO.

Incidentally, the way to betray an alliance in Albion is simply to feed an enemy information: locations and targets of zergs, for instance. That's why alliances won't reveal a zerg target to the zerg until you hit the realmgate (opsec!), and "spy questions" in discord are routinely laughed at.

Sure, but that's a single and highly limited means of undermining enemy alliances.

When there's relatively little effort and energy required to maintain an alliance and keep alliance territory, when game mechanics and UI protect alliance zergs from friendly fire and thus you can afford to spam AoE attacks against your enemy with impunity, and attempts to spy and undermine alliances from within are fairly ineffective... you risk chilling the game IMO.

Both sides, however, benefit from lack of friendly fire. Any shotcaller who thinks a zerg is simply throwing people at the enemy will be defeated quickly. I can see a cadence and order to a well-called zerg battle, and I'm new to it.

Also, enabling friendly fire enables a mass of griefing and exploitation that I think would be more costly than keeping it disabled. I don't like the idea of friendly fire.

That's what AO's done, to the point that they've had to add increasing checks against alliances: realmgates, alt restrictions, planned hideouts in the BZ for smaller guilds to seize because taking territory is nigh-impossible for all but the biggest guilds and alliances, etc. And even then, it's not had a strong effect as far as I know to upset the boring status quo.

Hideouts haven't been implemented yet, nor has the black zone rework. Also, in some cases, the changes are new enough that I think the effects haven't fully filtered into the meta.

Hopefully Fracture's alliance system has very little in common with AO's, because theirs is a bad one.

If I see a problem with the alliance system in AO, it's that it's unlimited without cost. On the other hand, that -does- allow newer guilds to get into alliances and experience the endgame content.

If alliance expansion were costly, the big alliances would be much less likely to accept newer guilds and players, and the power gap might well be even bigger.

@Alexian

Logistics! One thing Albion does do is force alliances to pick a realmgate to access the black zone, while also making certain areas more valuable than others. They also seem to be trying to make alts less effective at circumventing that restriction, by making more GvGs for territory take place at the same time.

The effect seems to be that the top alliances compete for the best areas, leaving room for up and coming alliances to compete for the less valuable regions.

"Room" is relative, of course; I think Fractured will have a lot more of it, and I'm hoping the logistics of covering that much space will make it difficult to project power.

Incidentally, the way to betray an alliance in Albion is simply to feed an enemy information: locations and targets of zergs, for instance. That's why alliances won't reveal a zerg target to the zerg until you hit the realmgate (opsec!), and "spy questions" in discord are routinely laughed at.

@Plume

As I understand it, you can have one claim per planet per account.

@Alexian said in Guilds & Governor pledge packs:

@Yitra said in Guilds & Governor pledge packs:

@Alexian Any chance you know which Guild you were referring too?

I do, but I don’t think that’s very relevant.

I’m not anti-big guilds or anti-empires. In fact, I feel very strongly that both should play crucial roles in the social and political fabric of the game.

I just want to make sure that the system is dynamic enough that we can avoid problems that have plagued other sandbox MMOs that include territory control. I don’t want a couple of guilds to rule the world 4 days after the game launches with no hope of ever challenging them.

Neither do I! I really hope logistics presents a significant challenge in this game.

@Alexian

As I understand it, governor-perk-claimed towns will actually start as hamlets, requiring citizens and work to upgrade to a more permanent town status. That will occupy my attention for a while, for sure!

All the same, based on the single continent we're playing on in Alpha, the amount of territory in Fractured is far larger than that in Albion. Controlling territory in Albion is a largely a matter of skilled GvG teams you can muster (and zergs), but distance doesn't really matter.

In Fractured, I get the impression distance will matter.

Oh, and while governors control town plots, they do not control individual house plots. Yeah, a guild town could still make life miserable for nearby claim owners on PvP worlds, but Arboreus should be largely immune.

I believe 46 of 47 limited pledge packages that include the starting governor perk have been sold.

My understanding is that each planet will have three continents, for a total of nine continents, and each continent will have many town locations. I don't have an actual count, but even if all the starting governors were in the same guild, and selected town spots on one continent, I'm not sure they would take all the available spots on that continent.

And that would leave seven or eight continents untouched.

Hmm. I was able to tank and mage-kill a huge spider, while wearing nothing, so the mage armor plus strength bonus seemed impressive, notwithstanding!

Also, the mage armor tooltip says it doesn't stack with armor, so I assumed it wasn't supposed to.

So, I've discovered that the mage armor bonus stacks with the strength armor bonus. I did a toon with 18 STR and INT, and I'm running around naked with 310 armor. Brown wolves can barely scratch me!

Ah, got it. One more thing I don't understand: looks like you should get 4% more crit chance at PER 17, and 1% at DEX 11, but with both I'm still seeing a crit chance of 4%.

OK, did a toon with 18 PER, INT, CHA, for this:

1600 endurance
24000 life
2880 energy

My STR/DEX/CON toon has 1620 energy, btw. Looks like the energy/endurance is swapped between the two, but the STR/DEX/CON toon gets- way- more life.

So, I just created a toon with 18 STR, DEX, and CON, and I have the following:

2880 endurance
77760 life

Clearly, adding the endurance and life for each stat from the above chart doesn't match at all, else I'd have this (if I added right):

6080 endurance
103280 life

If the numbers for the stats aren't additive, how do they work?

@Eurav

It's not the plots in the wild I care about: I was hoping to be able to have toons in multiple towns, say, three on Arboreus, one for each continent, and each with their own house.

I guess if we can share houses, that won't be a big deal, either way, but it would be nice.

@Eurav said in Can each of our account toons have a house?:

@Roccandil said in Can each of our account toons have a house?:

A house, though, can be on a city plot: which doesn't seem the same as claiming land for a house outside the borders of a city. In that case, maybe your toons can buy their own houses in a city, since it won't soak up individual claim plots.
Was that answered as well?

Having your house in the city is the same as claiming land outside of one. You have to choose one.

Hmm. Where did you hear this?

I installed the new client, and it loaded up much more quickly! The first time I tried to log into the world, however, the GUI came up, but the world itself was black. Relogging cleared that up.

A house, though, can be on a city plot: which doesn't seem the same as claiming land for a house outside the borders of a city. In that case, maybe your toons can buy their own houses in a city, since it won't soak up individual claim plots.

Was that answered as well?

@deusex2 said in So, just today's feedback - good and bad:

@Roccandil said in So, just today's feedback - good and bad:

I've heard that the rocks from which you get cut stone are supposed to drop more than one, which would help!

They're not. There's large rock node and you gather it with hammer. Usually, there are several large rock nodes clustered together, but each gives one rock block.

Right, but I heard that's a bug, and that they're supposed to be more like trees, which drop multiple logs when you cut them down. So each node should drop multiple blocks when you hit it with a hammer.

I've heard that the rocks from which you get cut stone are supposed to drop more than one, which would help!