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Discussion blog for Join Together with the Band
Goblin Squad Member
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Fireworks! ;)
Ambitious companies are therefore encouraged to actively recruit low-level members, guiding them through their early development in order to benefit from the rapid achievement gains of new players.
*Gears working and wheels spinning in head*
Would a company be a training company: With a high turn-over of new recruits graduating under the regular instructors, in a settlement?
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Goblin Squad Member
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This appears to back off of the idea that a character might be able to belong to multiple companies; a character can belong to one company and (through the company?) one settlement. Though I'd guess that someone could belong to a settlement, but not be in a company - is that possible?
I do like the limit on company sizes. 10-50 people is big enough to do something, but small enough to know everybody. Settlement leadership can focus on managing companies, not individuals.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Influence looks to be an interesting mechanic. I like the idea, though I have a few questions:
Can the influence of multiple companies be merged to accomplish something they alone cannot do, such as establish a settlement?
Is the influence spent or allocated?
Can a company with sufficient influence found multiple settlements?
Can a settlement be founded without the expenditure of Influence?
Could Influence be spent to instigate or accelerate an escalation?
Could influence be counter-spent to escape an instigated feud?
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Goblin Squad Member
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So with escalation cycles and artifact rewards it sounds like you can only claim them if you have enough influence. Will there be multiple tiers of the same artifact giving better bonuses the more influence you can spend, or would it be more of hoping the artifact falls within your companies influence?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Fireworks! ;)
Ambitious companies are therefore encouraged to actively recruit low-level members, guiding them through their early development in order to benefit from the rapid achievement gains of new players.*Gears working and wheels spinning in head*
Would a company be a training company: With a high turn-over of new recruits graduating under the regular instructors, in a settlement?
LOL. The Menudo Company. Once they hit a certain level they kicked out.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Re-reading the blog, this jumped out at me:
Smaller or less ambitious companies may instead establish control over a single hex by founding a "point of interest" structure in the hex, such as an inn, watchtower, or feudal manor. These outlying structures may be completely independent, or may be incorporated within the boundaries of a nearby settlement.
The seems to indicate that a POI can be operated independent of the nearby settlement. Can the settlement claim and utilize the hex while this unaffiliated structure is there? Can a hex hold multiple POI structures (farm, inn, and watchtower for example)? Could an unaffiliated structure be placed in a hex claimed by a settlement?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Sponsored companies effectively become part of that settlement, affecting its Reputation and following its alignment just like the rest of the settlement's population.
There was some speculation that alignment restrictions for Settlements had been abandoned. This makes it sound like they're still on the table.
Could you clarify what kind of alignment restrictions are in place for Settlements and Companies, and what it means to follow a Settlement's alignment?
Likewise sponsored companies share the settlement's alliances or sanctioned hostilities with other settlements.
This sounds like a great way to hire on a Mercenary Company to help you fight a battle.
Smaller or less ambitious companies may instead establish control over a single hex by founding a "point of interest" structure in the hex, such as an inn, watchtower, or feudal manor.
This sounds very cool. We remember how the special features of Inns and Watchtowers.
Can you tell us more about the special features of a Feudal Manor?
Companies that don't want to be troubled with the effort to take and hold territory may prefer to take over management of a resource-gathering facility such as a mine or farm... Similarly, companies within settlements may run a one of the settlement's production facilities.
That sounds really great, and I assure you that The Seventh Veil is still very interested in building libraries in other players' Settlements.
Do you expect it will be common to have most of these facilities run by independent Companies? Are there any significant differences between having these facilities managed by an independent Company versus being handled by the Settlement directly?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Influence looks to be an interesting mechanic. I like the idea, though I have a few questions:
Can the influence of multiple companies be merged to accomplish something they alone cannot do, such as establish a settlement?
Is the influence spent or allocated?
Can a company with sufficient influence found multiple settlements?
Can a settlement be founded without the expenditure of Influence?
Could Influence be spent to instigate or accelerate an escalation?
Could influence be counter-spent to escape an instigated feud?
All good questions, but I wouldn't expect any detailed answers right away.
We'll cover influence mechanics in more detail in a later blog post...
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Goblin Squad Member
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Influence looks to be an interesting mechanic. I like the idea, though I have a few questions:
Can the influence of multiple companies be merged to accomplish something they alone cannot do, such as establish a settlement?
Is the influence spent or allocated?
Can a company with sufficient influence found multiple settlements?
Can a settlement be founded without the expenditure of Influence?
Could Influence be spent to instigate or accelerate an escalation?
Could influence be counter-spent to escape an instigated feud?All good questions, but I wouldn't expect any detailed answers right away.
We'll cover influence mechanics in more detail in a later blog post...
While a response would be great, I'm more concerned with tossing out feedback that may or may not spark ideas or thought in a direction that may have otherwise been overlooked.
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Goblin Squad Member
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So with escalation cycles and artifact rewards it sounds like you can only claim them if you have enough influence. Will there be multiple tiers of the same artifact giving better bonuses the more influence you can spend, or would it be more of hoping the artifact falls within your companies influence?
I wasn't sure that was talking about artifacts specifically, or just rewards in a more general context. It made me think about the mechanic in Crusader Kings where the ranking commander got credit for winning a battle, even when someone else supplied most of the troops. So if multiple companies are involved in stopping an escalation, who gets credit? (And likely the battle trophies/artifacts that boost your settlement's history/reputation/Development Indexes.) It could be an influence auction. Or taking your idea a different direction, a company with only a small pool of influence might be able to claim only a small role in the history books.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Would a company be a training company: With a high turn-over of new recruits graduating under the regular instructors, in a settlement?LOL. The Menudo Company. Once they hit a certain level they kicked out.
That's a valid concern. When players leave a company (or get kicked out because they haven't played in a week), does it lose influence? Might some of the influence they gained with company #1 move with them to company #2? Might that encourage start-ups or spin-offs?
Or could influence be transferable? Maybe not a lossless transfer, but what if the settlement training company could gift/sell influence to other companies within the settlement, or even allied/friendly companies. Maybe at a 25% loss, so the training company loses 100 influence and the other company gains 75 influence. That would have a similar effect of encouraging spin-offs that meet the losing company's approval.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I do like the limit on company sizes. 10-50 people is big enough to do something, but small enough to know everybody. Settlement leadership can focus on managing companies, not individuals.
I didn't read that as a limit. I hope there isn't a 50 person limit on company size. I see no reason to do that.
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Goblin Squad Member
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... share communication lines...
Reading that made me think about the standard ability in most MMOs to create custom chat channels. I think it would be really great if Companies could create a number of custom chat channels that were automatically tied to the Company, and automatically joined by all Company members.
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Goblin Squad Member
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... share communication lines...Reading that made me think about the standard ability in most MMOs to create custom chat channels. I think it would be really great if Companies could create a number of custom chat channels that were automatically tied to the Company, and automatically joined by all Company members.
Auto-join is not a particularly good idea. If you have a scout channel for scouts to interact, it would be awful to have someone cluttering up the traffic with a conversation about what they had for dinner because one of their pals is a scout. An Administration channel would be a better example. You don't want everybody chiming in there while serious matters are discussed.
Better to be able to create the channels and have a list of company channels people can join.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Would a company be a training company: With a high turn-over of new recruits graduating under the regular instructors, in a settlement?LOL. The Menudo Company. Once they hit a certain level they kicked out.That's a valid concern. When players leave a company (or get kicked out because they haven't played in a week), does it lose influence? Might some of the influence they gained with company #1 move with them to company #2? Might that encourage start-ups or spin-offs?
Or could influence be transferable? Maybe not a lossless transfer, but what if the settlement training company could gift/sell influence to other companies within the settlement, or even allied/friendly companies. Maybe at a 25% loss, so the training company loses 100 influence and the other company gains 75 influence. That would have a similar effect of encouraging spin-offs that meet the losing company's approval.
Actually yeah that could be a very notable issue. I recall DDO had a huge problem with that when they introduced their guild leveling system... IE the leading power on at least one server, was a group of maybe 5 people for the longterm, the rest of their slots were spent grabbing up every noob they could get their hands on... and in general people in for more than a week were booted. (as after a week they were either past the point of super fast rep gain, or too inactive to be of worth)
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Sintaqx, you wouldn't have to create all the custom chat channels as Company channels. You'd just create the ones you wanted everyone to auto-join.
The problem I've seen before is when guild leadership says "everyone please join this channel", but not everyone does - either because of laziness or technical ineptitude or simply not noticing the request.
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Fireworks! ;)
Ambitious companies are therefore encouraged to actively recruit low-level members, guiding them through their early development in order to benefit from the rapid achievement gains of new players.*Gears working and wheels spinning in head*
Would a company be a training company: With a high turn-over of new recruits graduating under the regular instructors, in a settlement?
Is this gonig to work like Ashreons Call did?
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Goblin Squad Member
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For mercenaries, bandits, and agitators, influence can be used to declare a feud—a state of PvP hostilities like a war between settlements, but at shorter notice and for a shorter period—against another company or settlement.
Does this mean short term war mechanics, as they relate to Alignment (which I don't care about) and Reputation?
I can see this mechanic being used constantly, essentially it is company vs company warfare and adds to a target environment.
It also allows creates terms for short term contracts (ie mercenaries and privateers)..
I can't wait to get home and really dig through this blog!
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Replying to stuff that I can answer easily. I may leave some of the more in-depth questions to see if Tork feels like responding ;) .
This appears to back off of the idea that a character might be able to belong to multiple companies; a character can belong to one company and (through the company?) one settlement.
Not mentioned but still part of the design. We really like the idea of letting you have a system-supported social group with your real life friends or other contacts without impacting your ability to engage in serious organized play. We've also discussed the possibility of using that for things like trade and scholarly associations that cross settlement lines. But I don't think we're yet ready to go in depth on what mechanics will remain to an unsponsored, secondary company other than an easy way to keep in touch with one another.
Though I'd guess that someone could belong to a settlement, but not be in a company - is that possible?
Reply hazy, ask again later :) . (That is, it may be so useful to have extra members in your companies that it becomes policy for most settlements to stick their loose members in a convenient company; so even if we allowed it, you'd never really see it. We're still thinking on that.)
I do like the limit on company sizes. 10-50 people is big enough to do something, but small enough to know everybody. Settlement leadership can focus on managing companies, not individuals.
Exactly. One of the major goals is to keep players from getting lost in large numbers. Even though your settlement leaders might not know your name or really care about your concerns, your company leader will and your settlement will be more inclined to pay attention to your company's desires than to a handful of individuals.
Could you clarify what kind of alignment restrictions are in place for Settlements and Companies, and what it means to follow a Settlement's alignment?
Can you tell us more about the special features of a Feudal Manor?
Likely covered in some later posts. Stay tuned!
That's a valid concern. When players leave a company (or get kicked out because they haven't played in a week), does it lose influence?
Influence is a currency that would stay with the company.
The reason we don't think we'll see a lot of new players taken for their quick influence and then dumped is threefold
- Achievements require effort to get. You're not just milking the new player, you're actively helping them do the first things they need to do to get into the game. You're probably helping them get geared up. You're teaching them the game. You've put some real time into them, so it's not like you can just spam invites and expect the influence to roll in.
- Rafkin is correct, there's not a hard cap on members. 50 is the sweet spot, but we don't expect you to need to kick slightly older newbies to make space for the newest crop. You'll almost certainly be better off retaining them or at the very least transferring them out to an allied company that isn't right underneath the newb faucet for whatever reason.
- By the time your achievement earning speed tapers off meaningfully, we expect you to have a pretty decent chunk of character progression under your belt. Unless you were literally being carried around by the company, you now have your feet under you in the game, have some good gear and training that the company helped you get, and are a valuable member to some other company that cares about your contribution towards things other than influence gain. Even if you were being carried, you hopefully had a lot more fun in the game than you would have just trying to make your way through it without any early support, and, again, you are a lot better off training and gear wise than you would have been just wandering out of the starter zone.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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... Dear gods, you're trying to make companies fight over who gets to teach new players the ropes, and rewarding the ones that do so fastest and mostest.
The desired response to someone complaining about how they got introduced to open PvP the hard way is for them to get multiple invitations to newbie-focused companies.
That is nothing short of sublime genius, noble designers. I salute you.
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Goblin Squad Member
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This appears to back off of the idea that a character might be able to belong to multiple companies; a character can belong to one company and (through the company?) one settlement.Not mentioned but still part of the design.
Excellent! I was worried about that, too.
Stay tuned!
You can count on it :)
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Would a company be a training company: With a high turn-over of new recruits graduating under the regular instructors, in a settlement?LOL. The Menudo Company. Once they hit a certain level they kicked out.That's a valid concern. When players leave a company (or get kicked out because they haven't played in a week), does it lose influence? Might some of the influence they gained with company #1 move with them to company #2? Might that encourage start-ups or spin-offs?
Or could influence be transferable? Maybe not a lossless transfer, but what if the settlement training company could gift/sell influence to other companies within the settlement, or even allied/friendly companies. Maybe at a 25% loss, so the training company loses 100 influence and the other company gains 75 influence. That would have a similar effect of encouraging spin-offs that meet the losing company's approval.
Just super-duper quick - I'll come back to this thread tomorrow to do some more answering:
A Company's maximum influence at any time is determined by an equation that factors in their membership numbers. If you take on a player and get them to feed you influence you may lose some of that influence when you kick him because your maximum influence will be affected by your reduced membership. I am still tweaking that equation at the moment so it'll need to wait till the Influence blog post for further details I'm afraid, but it is designed with exactly this problem in mind. That said, as Stephen noted there are also plenty of reasons why we think its potentially ok for the majority of influence earned by a player to stick with the company.
TOTAL BONUS SNEEK-PEEK (all still stuff I'm working on)!! : It also helps to deal with some problems that come up in the calculation of feud costs, which take into consideration the relative size of an attacker vs. defender. These could potentially have been skewed by Companies deliberately booting out members to make themselves look tiny and insignificant when planning a feud or knowing they were about to be subject to one in order to achieve lower declaration costs, or inflate the cost of declaring against them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Sintaqx, you wouldn't have to create all the custom chat channels as Company channels. You'd just create the ones you wanted everyone to auto-join.
The problem I've seen before is when guild leadership says "everyone please join this channel", but not everyone does - either because of laziness or technical ineptitude or simply not noticing the request.
The only valid application I could think of is to join a joint operation channel where multiple companies converse, such as intel channels. I can see how an auto-join mandate would work here, it's a bit like a solution looking for a problem though.
I'm rather ambivalent on the topic. If folks can't join, they need to be taught. If they can and don't, it's darwinism at work.
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Goblin Squad Member
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... Dear gods, you're trying to make companies fight over who gets to teach new players the ropes, and rewarding the ones that do so fastest and mostest.
The desired response to someone complaining about how they got introduced to open PvP the hard way is for them to get multiple invitations to newbie-focused companies.
That is nothing short of sublime genius, noble designers. I salute you.
I'm going to have to agree, taking the problem of getting new players up to speed, and designing an incentive to 'help new players' into one of the most important mechanics in the game is almost too perfect to hope for.
As long as any pitfalls are quickly squashed, this should definitely alleviate any sort of population stagnation concerns people might worry about.
Also, I love the idea of these new companies being named academies or universities - just imagine senior companies looking for new members, and asking "So, I see here you graduated from the Magister's Academy, that's quite the pedigree"
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Goblin Squad Member
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... Dear gods, you're trying to make companies fight over who gets to teach new players the ropes, and rewarding the ones that do so fastest and mostest.
The desired response to someone complaining about how they got introduced to open PvP the hard way is for them to get multiple invitations to newbie-focused companies.
That is nothing short of sublime genius, noble designers. I salute you.
What he said. Instead of one EVE University, this policy may produce an Ivy League's worth of teaching companies in PFO.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Sintaqx, you wouldn't have to create all the custom chat channels as Company channels. You'd just create the ones you wanted everyone to auto-join.
The problem I've seen before is when guild leadership says "everyone please join this channel", but not everyone does - either because of laziness or technical ineptitude or simply not noticing the request.
The only valid application I could think of is to join a joint operation channel where multiple companies converse, such as intel channels. I can see how an auto-join mandate would work here, it's a bit like a solution looking for a problem though.
I'm rather ambivalent on the topic. If folks can't join, they need to be taught. If they can and don't, it's darwinism at work.
(Snark) I'm just glad to see people discussing the technical issues of auto-join vs. sign-up vs. invitation-only, rather than arguing that non-line of sight chat channels will break their immersion and encourage out-of-character communication. (/Snark)
Please excuse the snarkiness; it's been a trying day for me. Reading a dev blog with new mechanics definitely improved my mood, though.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Sintaqx, you wouldn't have to create all the custom chat channels as Company channels. You'd just create the ones you wanted everyone to auto-join.
The problem I've seen before is when guild leadership says "everyone please join this channel", but not everyone does - either because of laziness or technical ineptitude or simply not noticing the request.
The only valid application I could think of is to join a joint operation channel where multiple companies converse, such as intel channels. I can see how an auto-join mandate would work here, it's a bit like a solution looking for a problem though.
I'm rather ambivalent on the topic. If folks can't join, they need to be taught. If they can and don't, it's darwinism at work.
Maybe it could give companies a way to have players join a password protected channel without having to give out the password. That could work as added security if the discussions are meant to be confidential.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Maybe it could give companies a way to have players join a password protected channel without having to give out the password. That could work as added security if the discussions are meant to be confidential.@Sintaqx, you wouldn't have to create all the custom chat channels as Company channels. You'd just create the ones you wanted everyone to auto-join.
The problem I've seen before is when guild leadership says "everyone please join this channel", but not everyone does - either because of laziness or technical ineptitude or simply not noticing the request.
The only valid application I could think of is to join a joint operation channel where multiple companies converse, such as intel channels. I can see how an auto-join mandate would work here, it's a bit like a solution looking for a problem though.
I'm rather ambivalent on the topic. If folks can't join, they need to be taught. If they can and don't, it's darwinism at work.
Factor in the presence of spies within the company, and secure communications can fall down an endless rabbit hole, as in EVE. At least with 10-50 members, the average PFO company should have a greater level of trust than the average sovereignty-holding EVE corporation. I think the EVE level of paranoia will be more common in PFO settlements and kingdoms than in companies.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The addition of influence is REALLY good. This means that if companies accept memberships of mixed alignment, they're going have to accept the effects to their alignment, or else accept the loss in influence from not having those members in their company. So hopefully having all those lawful good crafters in your chaotic evil settlement mean missing out on some bonuses unless your group is huge enough to have a fully populated lawful-good and chaotic evil settlement.
One thing I would like to see implemented is the idea that players who are not members of your settlement / chartered company generate influence when they quest and craft in a hex owned by another organization. The gains should be low enough that it's much more valuable to have them as a full member, but high enough that groups have an incentive to keep their settlements populated / avoid NBSI policies.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think these companies might cause some interesting emergent gameplay. I'd expect, all things being equal, that it might be better/easier for a settlement to have each company with a somewhat clear role. So some companies are crafters, some are long-haul merchants, some are military or adventurers. A settlement could have multiple companies of any one type.
Once companies are established, and once they've started spending their influence on boons, they might be increasing locked into a given role. If a company starts out as traders and spends its influence gaining a near monopoly on the silver trade, changing the company focus to be a cleric order might be a waste of the influence that was spent. So companies might gain a life of their own, even through a series of leaders. Players might shift companies more often than companies shift roles. (So the social companies might be pretty useful for long-term connections.)
I could even imagine that old derelict companies might have some value, if the last surviving member sells the company with its assets and the dregs of its former influence before he logs off for the last time. Starting a new company with the shell of an old company might be a useful technique, depending on how long boons and influence last.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I really hope the way a true neutral settlement function is it's a decent settlement for all alignments, but caters best to true neutral plays where a NG aligned settlement is optimal for NG players and pretty good for LG, TN, and CG, but terrible for someone who's evil. And LG is geat for LG, pretty good for NG, LN, and maybe TN but pretty bad for everyone else.
That does kind of favor more neutral alignments but it also gives people a reason to form groups that cater to corner alignments. If in the end ~50% of settlements and the other 50% is everything else... that isn't a horrible breakdown.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In the Goblinworks blog entry A Stately Pleasure-Dome Decree (June 26), they said about the different sizes or tiers of buildings (partial extract):
Large Buildings are the major structures of the settlement, and include the town's hall, buildings that host training functions for multiple character roles, and buildings that grant a major benefit or capability to the settlement (such as an important marketplace or a barracks to house a strong garrison of NPC guards). A settlement can only have a couple of large buildings, so deciding which large buildings to construct is how you decide what your settlement is going to do.
A true neutral settlement might have lots of medium sized buildings, so they might choose to support all alignments to a given degree, but they might not be able to provide peak support to everyone. Or they might not be able to provide peak support to anyone - depending on how the city develops, I'd guess.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think one of the major structures for every alignment should be pantheon that provides all the major abilities for clerics/paladins/druids/inquisitors of the settlement's alignment, the vast majority of those adjacent alignments can use, and only the most basic non alignment specific stuff for opposing alignments.
I think trade / manufacturing type structures should be pretty equal across the board. I really like things which will give crafters/traders/other non-combat types to go evil because otherwise most evil groups will disassociate their crafters from their groups and make them an alignment that's harder to hunt.
I think a good aligned force without good-aligned crafters imbuing weapons with angel feathers / unicorn tears to give them protection from evil and good aligned key words should be very gimped, and an evil group without evil crafters imbuing their items with the blood of the innocent / demon spittle to get protection from good and evil aligned keywords should be gimped as well.
Some dryad sap etc. for neutrals wouldn't go amiss either. Same goes for law/chaos.