Posts made by Roccandil

@Meziljin said in Grueling upkeep!:

so if 200 citizen leave game, we will have a ghost town forever.... no upkeep it's actually the only money sink.
It is frustrating each day we have to pay taxes, i hope dev will move to 1 per week (surely bigger, but stressless).

A ghost town will only be a problem on Arboreus, since they can be conquered on the other planets. For Arboreus, I'd look for another way to solve the problem (if it is a problem): say, X number of unanswered citizen requests after Y time.

Money is odd in this game: mobs poop it out, and cities eat it, for no apparent reason. That seems overly simplistic; I'd be much more interested in seeing how a barter-based economy would work (or even currencies that are player-managed!).

Furthermore, even the food aspect of upkeep is odd. Who's being fed? Players already have to feed themselves and craft/build everything, and there are no NPCs around to help out.

Upkeep would make more sense if it were wood and stone, to keep buildings repaired, based on actual usage plus natural decay per building.

City upkeep is grueling (pun intended! ) Instead, I'd like to see upgrades. For example, with X citizens and Y resources, we could permanently upgrade the city, and as long as we kept the right number of citizens, we keep that upgrade enabled.

Upkeep, though, is just chores. I'm just not interested in doing the same things over and over again to keep a city alive, and if I'm not interested, I'm not going to expect anyone else to be interested.

What I really want is a city I can build up incrementally, long-term, without feeling like if I don't log in for one day, it's going to collapse.

I've had a similar problem: some areas appear clear, but I can't build, while in others, I can build overtop trees/herbs/etc. Seems inconsistent.

@Stormtrooper

You're certainly welcome in Underrim! I'm a governor planning to put my town on Arboreus when it's available, so I think we'll be a good fit for gathering and crafting.

Anyhow, good luck wherever you go.

Underrim is live for the next test! The location is a large city on the coast, southwest of the Whispering Wood and the starter town near there.

Should be open to anyone, and if you want a discord invite, let me know.

Very cool!

@Tuoni said in New World by Amazon - Anyone interested?:

Before going for your suggestion perhaps the developers should start with adding different kind of mobs. Fighting the same mobs (there is just few different kind) from lvl 1 to 50 starts to get boring really fast.

That's just scaling up the same old static, mob-spawning system that's in most MMOs. If the developers were going to implement a next-gen mob system, it might be better to do that earlier to test it.

I don't think they will, though, either way. New World does look fun, but only the graphics seemed next-gen; everything else felt like traditional mechanics, just arranged a bit differently.

Given the amount of resources I'd assume are available to the New World developers (especially the existing Amazon server infrastructure), that's disappointing.

@Ostaff said in New World by Amazon - Anyone interested?:

Of course, with this approach players would do a realm genocide and make it so no mobs could breed

Yeah, that's I would always have one "core" spawner that couldn't be destroyed, so the potential for boars to repopulate would always exist (call me a Coreboar! ).

I was in the test, but I couldn't play it, since it's not supported on Win 8.1 I'm not going to upgrade my system (and potentially my hardware) just for New World, so we'll see if they make it any more backward compatible in future test.

If not, I'll be waiting a while. I did notice that the game didn't seem to have a lot of new concepts, just old ones bolted together.

This was one of my suggestions for a next-gen open world MMO, and I think it largely applies to Fractured too:

Been thinking about this more, and here’s a more in-depth example of what a next-gen MMO could do:

Dynamic Wildlife Biomes

In my experience, MMOs usually have static mob spawners that do little more than replace mobs at static intervals.

Instead, what if wildlife were dynamic, changing in the world and changing the world? Here’s one possible implementation:

• Boar mobs are configured to seek out forest biomes
• A core boar spawner is placed in a forest biome, adding X boars over Y interval
• If the active boar population in the area reaches Z, then level up the spawner

The leveled spawner can now do several new things:

• Send squads of boars to investigate nearby territory for expansion
• Spawn higher-level boars, tougher, of course, and with better possible ingredients if killed
• Spawn a Boar dungeon in the heart of the forest, with (naturally) a nasty boar boss. If players complete this dungeon too many times, the spawner is considered subdued, and loses a level, ultimately reverting back to core and despawning the dungeon

The boars will thus seek to expand their territory within specific biomes (and not human-recognized territories, of course), going to war with the current wildlife in those biomes if needed. If successful, the boars will place an auxiliary boar spawner in the conquered biome, that works in all ways like the core spawner, except it can be destroyed.

At the same time, any predator that considers boars to be prey will find the increased population of boars a tasty, tasty treat! They may attempt to move in to the forest biome, and thus place an auxiliary spawner of their own kind within the boar biome (since the boars themselves are a biome to the predator).

Note how this makes “kill X mob” missions more interesting. A faction may not want boars to increase in its area, and thus will post meaningful “kill X mob” quests to control the boar population.

Or, a faction may want to prevent an enemy faction from reaping the benefits of higher-level boar ingredients, and thus post PvP boar-poaching missions, or PvP missions to complete a boar dungeon in enemy territory.

Note also how this makes world dungeons more interesting. Their appearance is dependent on more subtle world conditions, defeating them can have subtle world effects, and leaving them alone can also have subtle world effects.

Finally, the Corruption mechanic could tie right into this dynamic wildlife, by (what else) corrupting it. Corruption could send its tendrils into that boar dungeon, and it might start spawning corrupted boars in the area: tougher and more aggressive, desiring to spread Corruption as far as possible.

Furthermore, a corrupted dungeon within X distance of a faction town could have innate negative effects on the town, thus spawning more meaningful faction missions.

Again, I think the above framework transcends PvE or PvP, and provides a means to make both more meaningful.

@Farlander said in New Armors and weapons, how do you think will effect the gameplay and your build?:

@Nekrage D&D is the same way. I have always found it best to run high dex with lighter armor than to run with heavy armor and lose the dex bonus. Heavy armor always seems to be wanting in fantasy builds..

At least in Baldur's Gate II, my heavily-armored Barbarian was the only character I had who could go toe-to-toe with a dragon.

Yeah, the term "PvP" is often conflated with involuntary, lopsided, open-world, full-loot PvP.

For instance, World of Tanks is entirely PvP, no PvE (that I know of), but it also has the following characteristics:

• Voluntary
• Not full loot
• Attempts to reduce the skill/gear delta between opposing forces, and simply doesn't allow zerg-ganking

Despite those differences from open world, full loot PvP, however, World of Tanks could be extremely intense, and more PvP-per-minute than any open world MMO. WoT isn't about PvEing while wondering if a ganking party is going to chase you, or about being in a ganking party trying to jump a hugely-outnumbered gatherer.

What I've seen is that people coming into open world games saying they want "PvP" often just want lopsided, involuntary, full-loot griefing. As far as I'm concerned, that isn't real PvP.

@Harleyyelrah said in The Potential City Problem.:

The biggest difference is the city sieges. If we can only siege cities that are directly connected to us on the road, we will be er.. fighting our neighbors quite often! My experience with human nature is that if two groups are at war, they will not be working nicely to promote trade with each other

Good point! Of course, there will be advantages to warring in only one direction (a multi-front war may not be desirable), which will open possibilities for trade, even on PvP worlds.

And if the PvP worlds coalesce into a few power blocs, and everyone starts holding hands, trading may not be a problem at all.

@Razvan said in The Potential City Problem.:

The point of this question is that if you make it harder for big guilds to split into multiple towns, as Prometheus claims, the game will also become harder for smaller guilds owning cities, and probably impossible for casual ones.

This isn't about big guilds versus small guilds, it's about the most efficient use of an individual's time, namely, will it be worth it to buy multiple accounts to bypass restrictions?

That is, you could have five players with nine accounts, each running a toon in nine gold towns, trying to hold a monopoly. If that's practical, that's a problem. (I don't think it will be, and I'm willing to wait and see how the existing configuration shakes out.)

I don't, however, have a problem with forty-five real players (or more) attempting a monopoly, if only because it looks like Fractured will provide alternate ways to get the same resource (multiple continents and trade across planets), and also multiple ways to apply pressure on cities.

What I'm hoping is that due to the game's design, any significant abuse of the city resource system will be both obvious to the developers, and an exception rather than a rule, making it easy to police.

@Nekrage said in The Potential City Problem.:

@Tuoni said in The Potential City Problem.:

@Ostaff I did not want a list of all games you have played which have alts. Only those where alts have actual impact to other players gaming experience and especially to the player driven economy. Anyway, if you think this is generally just about having several alts then I understand why you do not acknowledge the concern. I guess you have not seen how alts can be used very wrong like in Albion and EvE online. Anyhow, even I would personally want to see as less as possible impact from alts, I can personally adapt and take the maximum benefit out from them if that is the case.

100% this. I want this changed. If it’s not changed I will certainly abuse it.

How would you abuse it?

Tech tree and ability leveling.

@Razvan said in The Potential City Problem.:

@Roccandil
What is the minimum number of active players a town-owning guild should have? Is 50 enough? What is the difference between a big 200 members guild split into 4 towns, and 4 medium-sized (50 members) guilds which own one town each?

Since gold is a scarce resource, let's look at the example continent we've got. I count nine gold nodes. I can't tell from the map whether any of the cities are large, so let's assume they're all small: five citizens each to at least keep the city, so forty-five players at a minimum (assuming the guild can claim all the city plots first).

Forty-five players is easy, but feeding nine cities without cereal nodes will be a challenge. Our monopoly-oriented guild will have a few options:

• Trade gold for cereals (reducing the effectiveness of their monopoly);
• Grow each city to unlock another node for cereal (if that's possible, and if so, the citizen requirements will increase);
• Devote valuable space in each city to crops (sacrificing space for houses and crafting buildings, probably ensuring the towns will always remain small and low on the tech tree);
• Build even more cities devoted to cereals to transport to the gold cities (requires many more citizens).

I'm seeing significant risk, cost, difficulty, and downsides to attempting a one-guild monopoly, which indicates good game balance.

Griefing, on the other hand, is generally a low-cost activity. Since this isn't, I don't have a problem with a one-guild monopoly theoretically being possible on Arboreus (although I suspect any actual monopolies will occur via collusion among guilds).

Also, I'd expect gold nodes to be on all three continents, making a monopoly harder to achieve.

You can't base a game mechanic on the wishful thinking that maybe everyone will refuse to trade with a certain guild.

This isn't a question of intention, but capability. As long as the potential exists for everyone else to sanction a guild (or guilds) with a monopoly, that's good enough for me.

PS: What do you mean exactly with "economic PvP"? Materials obtained from PvE are also resources and a big part of Arboreus. If they don't change their vision and the game gets popular, you'll have zones like the Vale with a bunch of groups trying to steal each other's mobs because they can't dispute farming spots. Or more realistically, the level of Albion's blue zone griefing when it went f2p.

From my perspective, the above scenario of a guild (or guilds) attempting to gain a monopoly, and the diplomatic efforts from other guilds to counter the monopolists (arranging sanctions, looking for alternate trade sources, etc.), are all economic PvP.

@Razvan said in The Potential City Problem.:

Arboreus is not very well thought at this point. Having limited public farming spots and resources without being able to dispute them will lead to a lot of griefing.

City resources require a functioning city to claim and exploit, and keeping a city running is not easy. Any guild that spreads themselves thin trying to claim all of a resource type (say, gold) will have a hard time keeping those cities from decaying.

Furthermore, the rest of the continent can refuse to trade with the gold monopoly guild, weakening them further.

Arboreus may wind being the place for economic PvP, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

@Nekrage said in The Potential City Problem.:

@Roccandil said in The Potential City Problem.:

The above scenario is not free:

You must pay real money for each account;

Righttttt....and that gives you an ADVANTAGE.

As it stands it's required to be the most efficient. That's P2W.

No, it isn't.

@Nekrage said in The Potential City Problem.:

The game should absolutely be limited to 1 character and 1 account.

That's a practical impossibility. The developers would have to invest significant resources in being account police, with three huge downsides:

• They'd never catch everyone who's multi-accounting;
• They'd annoy legitimate players;
• The opportunity cost of the developer resources spend on policing would detract from maintaining the rest of the game.

Balancing the game around multi-toon support is far more efficient.

Lets just put this into perspective.
Let me log on all of my alts to obtain the materials I need and cycle on that as much as possible.
Character 1: Iron ore.
Character 2: Copper ore.
Character 3: Orichalcum
Character 4: Rubies
Character 5: Topaz
Character 6: Diamond
Character 7: Lumber
Character 8: Amethyst
I will be here to tell you "I told you so" when this becomes just as I explained above ruining all PvP and trading.

The above scenario is not free:

• You must pay real money for each account;
• You must spend the time on each account to get each resource;
• To exploit the resources, you must move -all- of them to a central location, and that may require traveling across half a continent multiple times (since the unique city resources are clearly going to be spread out).

Yeah, sign me up for that!

I would love to hear from @Prometheus that there are NO plans to allow players to obtain materials from other cities beyond trading thus confirming that alts and multiple accounts are REQUIRED to be the most successful you can be.

We'll see how it plays out, but as it stands, I don't see multi-accounting being required. It sounds tedious, expensive, and frustrating: I expect trading to be much more efficient.

@Nekrage said in The Potential City Problem.:

And that's a problem in its self. You HAVE to play multiple characters due to the "meta".
You be the most efficient you MUST have multiple characters. I personally think the multiple characters thing shouldn't even be permitted. It allows for spying but that's another topic.

That's not multi-accounting, though: I get eight or nine toons on this account as it is! So, that's a dev design decision.

As to stealing resources from nodes, that's also up to the devs, but I'd like to see how it works as it stands now.