Goblin Squad Member
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I'm planning my first ever Gencon trip and noticed this event on the schedule:
Title: Inside Pathfinder Online
Short Description: Goblinworks raised $1.4 million to fund development of a fantasy sandbox MMO. Join Goblinworks team for overview of behind-the-scenes graphics & game footage highlighting work in progress.
Anyone else thinking of attending this 1 hour seminar?
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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If I make it out this year I will do a recording like I did last year. (At least the audio)
Have a newborn on the way sometime around the end of July/beginning of Aug though so GenCon might be out of the picture this year. Even so I might see I can get one of the other people in my company who I know will be there to do a recording of it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I was lucky enough to go to the seminar last year and received a lot of good information in doing so. If you do go, I'd advise anyone to stay if they have a Q&A afterwords. We stayed almost 2 hours after the fact to have additional questions answered and cemented my interest in the future game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Man, I wish I lived closer to Indianapolis, but it is a 12 hour drive for me. I went back in 2010 for the first time, and I swear I want to go back. Maybe next year.
I had a really good time, although it was more family oriented than what I was used to, been going to DragonCon in Atlanta for the past 5 years, and it is much more adult oriented.
I think a recording of this would be be very awesome!
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Goblin Squad Member
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I plan on attending, quite looking forward to it in fact. I hope to meet some of you there.
I must admit, it'd be a little backwards to meet someone who I intend to play a MMO with IRL before in game, how strange.
Sasori, Grand-master of the Gram Maw Company, founding company of Aragon.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I attended the PFO presentation at GenCon on Saturday, Aug 16th.
Ryan Dancy, Lee Hammock and Lisa Stevens made up the panel. Ryan made a short presentation about the status of the game, and then opened up the floor to questions.
After the presentation, Lee stayed outside in the hallway chatting and answering questions for another half hour or so, which was greatly appreciated, thanks Lee!
I didn’t take complete notes, but jotted down anything that seemed interesting, so this isn’t a full report, just some highlights.
I will divide this into three sections, the first is short tidbits of information. The second is some longer reporting and observations, and the last is some important news about war of the towers as a reward for anyone that makes it all the way through this.
Tidbits:
Open Enrollment still targeted for January 2016.
Goblinworks currently employs 21 full time staff.
Alpha was opened to 250 participants before the wave of invites that just went out. The latest wave of invites was each alpha participant receiving 3 invites to distribute, so total potential alpha population is approx. 1,000 now.
Tier 1 = level 1 to 8, takes 1 month of experience.
Tier 2 = level 9 to 16, takes 1 year of experience.
Tier 3 = level 17 to 20, takes 2 years of experience.
Mac Client will be ready sometime between EE and OE. Hopefully soon after the start of EE.
Roads and other buildable non-settlement structures are being discussed, but they will require a lot of art and programming time that will have to be prioritized.
Longer Reports:
PVP - the first question asked was “can I opt out of participating in PVP”. Ryan and Lee provided a great tag-team answer. Ryan said “No”, and then Lee gave a long description of all the mechanics in the game designed to keep PVP meaningful. Lee focused on the faction mechanic as being the main way that PVP enthusiasts will find their opponents, while steering PVP away from non-consensual interactions. (Hellknights vs Bandits was used as an example).
Settlement Recruiting - Lee was asked about how newbies will find appropriate groups to join. In the short term, it will be recruiting on the forums and in-game chat channels. In the medium term, a “company interface window” will allow companies to pitch themselves through a searchable list, much like guild recruitment in other games. At some point in the new player experience, they will be directed towards this interface. In the long term, Lee would like to see Settlements be able to build embassies in the starting towns, staffed by NPCs that newbies could interact with, be given information about the settlements and potentially a limited use teleportation ability to the settlement if they decide to join. (This has interesting ramifications re: settlement proximity to similar aligned starting towns. Also hopefully will cut down on constant recruitment spam in chat channels.)
Gathering - Each hex has a rating from 1 to 10,000 for each material type. When a node is harvested, it produces materials proportional to the hex’s rating, and then decreases the ratings slightly. (I’m not sure we heard that 1 to 10,000 number before.) Ratings recover over time. The higher the rating is, the faster the recovery rate, so over-harvesting has significant long-term effects. Lee indicated that “clear cutting” a hex was a viable option, either by the owners to exploit it and then move on, or also against an opponent’s hex as a form of economic sabotage. Being able to effectively prevent harvesting on your territory won’t be easy until much later in development when the law setting and criminal flag systems are implemented.
Settlement Warfare - Lee described a number of factors such as total DI, number of members, size, etc.. that would generate a measure of how powerful a settlement was. The costs of declaring war are low against a settlement of equal power to yours, and rise dramatically when you declare on a settlement much less powerful. This is intended to keep big settlements from crushing small ones recklessly. Lee also emphasized that the “costs” of a war declaration are permanent, significant costs of DI, not just gold or resources that could be farmed up as needed.
Recovery after losing your settlement - Lee indicated that the goal was for the map to keep expanding, such that there were always open settleable hexes on the edges of the map for groups to create new settlements. (This sort of contradicted a statement by Ryan that there would be more people wanting to run a settlement then there were settlements. Perhaps that means the number of settlements will be limited more by the difficulty of getting hundreds of players to cooperate rather than by simple lack of available land.)
Anyway, Lee indicated that an established group who lost their settlement to siege warfare should be able to relocate to the fringes of the map and start building anew. Lee suggested several advantages these groups would have over a collection of newbies: More experience and better feats, until they start to lose access because of no support, and that hopefully the members had some resources stashed in NPC towns or friendly settlements to get a headstart on building costs and upkeeps.
War of Towers:
Here is your reward for reading through all my ramblings…
After the presentation I asked Lee about the restriction that 1 company could only take 1 tower, and how that would present difficulties for all but the very largest settlements in the landrush.
Lee responded that GW was aware of the issue and would make some changes to ensure that the WoT works as intended. He said that most likely, companies would be able to take multiple towers for their settlements. An exact number has not been determined, but Lee said somewhere around 3 towers per company might be reasonable.
The best thing about talking with Lee Hammock is that he’s obviously just as excited about the game as we are!
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Goblin Squad Member
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Hellknights vrs Bandits was reiterated a couple of times as well. It gave me the impression GW still expects LE as the most prevalent enemies of criminal chaotics. Admittedly I might have read too much into it.
Their definition of what low reputation means was what stood out to me. It is perhaps the most blunt way I have ever heard them define it in a presentation.
Low Reputation - Players that habitually participate in non consensual pvp.
Pretty cut and dry to me. It is not new information, just put as blunt as possible. They specifically used gatherers as their example "target" in the following example portion. They expect gatherers will be top reputation players in most cases. If you want what a gatherer has, you have to weigh the cost of killing them to take it. That cost is set as intentionally high. The reputation sink is deep, and they are strongly considering adding in an option for killed gatherers to "break your gear threads". Then if they contract with a bounty hunter he/she can not only kill you but also take your stuff.
There was no mention of SADs to counteract this in the foreseeable future, giving me the impression that it might be a while before that is even a consideration.
The short term balance for this in the example was factions and feuds. It is intentional for you to weigh the cost of attacking a high reputation target that is not opted in versus a target that is consequence free. Obviously in most cases the latter should be the preferred target unless low reputation is your base line character anyways.
On that Note - Lisa Stevens doubled down on low reputation characters, doing what low reputation characters do. The initial consequence of participating in non consensual pvp is the reputation dump. If you continue to that thing and become an issue for the less pvp enthused players they will refund your money and ban you from the game.
Ryan reiterated after that the primary focus of the game is settlement politics. Because of that the expected acceptable aggressive actions are tied to companies, factions, and settlement warfare. Again not breaking news, just a reinforcement of the stance we have been shown all along.
I asked if they had considered the cost of high protections for gatherers when it comes to attaining goods from other social groups controlled hexes. Like Gaskon mentioned, they identify the problem but an intricate solution to that problem likely will not exist even when settlements go live.
What they did not include in the answer was NBSI/NRDS. If those settings exists but individual laws do not I could see NBSI being a favorable option for non trade oriented settlements to initially address the issue. I am actually curious if they feel those two settings can be added easier than individual laws, and if the option could be implemented sooner rather than later.
Note - I am not entertaining a debate on low reputation or other hot button topics. I am just relaying what I heard and the thoughts it generated. Personally I have no issue with relatively high constraints on non consensual pvp. My game was already set at the settlement level, so I only asked for clarifications relative to power blocks and settlement controls.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I like the sound of what you're describing there, Charlie. My concern as I turn that model around in my head and look at it from different angles, is that when high-rep characters find ways to wage non-violent warfare- market war, intelligence/recon, node depletion and so on- that it will be difficult and costly to effectively discourage them except by spending DI for a feud or war. There are many ways to attack which do not trigger the "attacker" flag.
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Goblin Squad Member
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For those who were there, how full was the room? (Full enough to significantly increase PFO's visibility to the gaming public, I wonder?)
If clear-cutting is a valid tactic of economic warfare, and killing gatherers is prohibitively expensive in terms of reputation, then I foresee a lot of economic warfare.
(And a lot of low-rep alts trained just enough to kill gatherers. The game may not be able to tell the difference between a solo newb gathering to make a living, and a swarm of locusts gathering to choke off a rival settlement's economy, but players certainly can.)
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Goblin Squad Member
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I like the sound of what you're describing there, Charlie. My concern as I turn that model around in my head and look at it from different angles, is that when high-rep characters find ways to wage non-violent warfare- market war, intelligence/recon, node depletion and so on- that it will be difficult and costly to effectively discourage them except by spending DI for a feud or war. There are many ways to attack which do not trigger the "attacker" flag.
They identified that not only as a concern, but one they might not be able to address in any timely manner. I was left with the impression that planning for it as an inevitability is the smartest route to travel for settlement minded players.
In my mind the most inconvenient consequence will be unaffiliated high reputation gatherers being used as an alt-account-tactic. If a major power block sends their standard gatherers in to salt the earth of an enemy hex there at least exists a way to impose consequences.
I don't imagine that will be the norm. This is spit balling, but it seems more likely those power blocks will use separate accounts that have gatherers that are either unaffiliated or affiliated with disposable companies. It would be hard to use the same characters repeatedly because it is more traceable. They don't really have to have high level characters on those accounts though. If the goal is to deplete the hex, you just need to be able to access the nodes.
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Goblin Squad Member
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For those who were there, how full was the room? (Full enough to significantly increase PFO's visibility to the gaming public, I wonder?)
If clear-cutting is a valid tactic of economic warfare, and killing gatherers is prohibitively expensive in terms of reputation, then I foresee a lot of economic warfare.
(And a lot of low-rep alts trained just enough to kill gatherers. The game may not be able to tell the difference between a solo newb gathering to make a living, and a swarm of locusts gathering to choke off a rival settlement's economy, but players certainly can.)
Half to 5/8's capacity at a quick glance. Around half or a little under were alpha access and goblin squad members.
I don't have hard numbers, but if I were to recall a guess I would say over twenty in the room. Around eight to twelve goblin squad folks.
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Goblin Squad Member
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They don't really have to have high level characters on those accounts though. If the goal is to deplete the hex, you just need to be able to access the nodes.
I think they'd at least need to be high enough as gatherers to start making a dent in the higher level resources. If all they're doing is depleting the ratings for the T1 mats, it's a bit of a wasted effort.
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Goblin Squad Member
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20 people? I've gotta say, that's a little disappointing. I know GW isn't looking to grow like the early days of WOW, but 20 people out of all the GenCon attendees is virtual invisibility.
Being ganked while minding your own business can suck. I'm no god of PVP, frothing at the mouth about "care bears ruining my game," but I'm getting worried that GW might be sliding too far toward the "all non-consensual PVP = griefing" end of the spectrum. If I can't opt out of PVP, but those who attack me are on their way to getting banned, then I don't really need to formally opt out.
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Goblin Squad Member
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They don't really have to have high level characters on those accounts though. If the goal is to deplete the hex, you just need to be able to access the nodes.I think they'd at least need to be high enough as gatherers to start making a dent in the higher level resources. If all they're doing is depleting the ratings for the T1 mats, it's a bit of a wasted effort.
That is a fair point and one I missed. Are T1 nodes calculated when the game figures up depletion or does the hex deplete by type?
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Goblin Squad Member
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20 people? I've gotta say, that's a little disappointing. I know GW isn't looking to grow like the early days of WOW, but 20 people out of all the GenCon attendees is virtual invisibility.
Being ganked while minding your own business can suck. I'm no god of PVP, frothing at the mouth about "care bears ruining my game," but I'm getting worried that GW might be sliding too far toward the "all non-consensual PVP = griefing" end of the spectrum.
Pretty much my thoughts. I do not get what they are doing at this point. If you are going to ban people for PVPing too much, In ways that you allow in the game, then why allow it in the game?
20 people is about what was there last year too. I had hoped for some growth.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Why would anyone need to use a separate account for a high rep gatherer to salt the earth?
They are not low rep PVPing and will not need to fear an account ban.
Also, Adventure time with Bonnie is a quick way to get your money back. LOL
Separate paid trained characters at least. In my mind the separation would be for identification purposes.
Example: A TEO gathering group heads off to Ozem's Vigil to over farm their hex. They don't want to go to war with them just yet and as such don't want to be identified by their company or settlement affiliation. They form a group up with unaffiliated or non TEO affiliated characters.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ok, I see what you were talking about now.
I understood the non-affiliated characters, but not the separate account. For now anyway, you will need more then one account.
Most that follow that tactic will not have a company at all. Or just quit and rejoin as needed for training. That way they can do their job risk free of a war or feud and force the other guys to take the rep hits.
Sounds like griefing to me, with the new ban revelations.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Are T1 nodes calculated when the game figures up depletion or does the hex deplete by type?
I may have been misinterpreting this:
Gathering - Each hex has a rating from 1 to 10,000 for each material type. When a node is harvested, it produces materials proportional to the hex’s rating, and then decreases the ratings slightly.
I suppose it depends on how granular "each material type" is.
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Goblin Squad Member
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20 people? I've gotta say, that's a little disappointing. I know GW isn't looking to grow like the early days of WOW, but 20 people out of all the GenCon attendees is virtual invisibility.
Being ganked while minding your own business can suck. I'm no god of PVP, frothing at the mouth about "care bears ruining my game," but I'm getting worried that GW might be sliding too far toward the "all non-consensual PVP = griefing" end of the spectrum.
Pretty much my thoughts. I do not get what they are doing at this point. If you are going to ban people for PVPing too much, In ways that you allow in the game, then why allow it in the game?
20 people is about what was there last year too. I had hoped for some growth.
At this point I might as well jump in the deep end. Going to throw in my thoughts while the thread is still cordial.
I thought pretty heavily on this topic as we made the 5 turned 8 hr drive back home. The more I thought about how they are presenting pvp controls the less I looked at it as a hard line hindrance.
It all depends on whom they are trying to attract to the game. More often than not your target audience is affected by factors not immediately in your control as well. I see a situation where two main factors being true would make their billing of pvp controls a smart business choice:
1. You are attempting to cross pollinate players. I think it is safe to say this condition is true. Pathfinder Online is already a more brutal game than Pathfinder RPG gamers might be used to. Giving them assurances that their game experience won't be ruined is important if you want them to play in your sandbox.
2. The existing sandbox player base is generally picky about the games they invest in. I don't have hard data for this, just my personal experience. Still, I think it is a true condition as well. EoX has talked with a lot of folks from other sandbox games. We have folks in Pandemic Legion, Solar Storm (Eve) as well as contacts in other large meta game communities. We have gained a number of individual interested players from those efforts, but most of the larger organizations are lax to go all in for PfO at this early stage. I know Cheatle and TEO have been just as thorough as us. I would be curious to hear if they got similar feedback.
If one and two are true, then in my mind it is smart to appeal to the audience you are likely to be filling server ranks with on the short term. With that incoming funds you build a compelling feature rich game for group two.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Are T1 nodes calculated when the game figures up depletion or does the hex deplete by type?I may have been misinterpreting this:
Gathering - Each hex has a rating from 1 to 10,000 for each material type. When a node is harvested, it produces materials proportional to the hex’s rating, and then decreases the ratings slightly.I suppose it depends on how granular "each material type" is.
Yeah, perhaps a TBD situation. That said thinking on it if I had to pick a more likely situation I would favor your interpretation over mine.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If only 20 people showed up at GenCon, I don't know whether that bodes well for attracting gamers from group one, either. This gathering sounds much more like "Q&A for Kickstarter backers" than "Introducing our game to the RPG hobby at large."
Then again, with Alpha still running, maybe GW didn't want to attract too many people to a game they can't play yet. Maybe next year's PaizoCon and GenCon will get a bigger recruiting push.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If only 20 people showed up at GenCon, I don't know whether that bodes well for attracting gamers from group one, either. This gathering sounds much more like "Q&A for Kickstarter backers" than "Introducing our game to the RPG hobby at large."
Then again, with Alpha still running, maybe GW didn't want to attract too many people to a game they can't play yet. Maybe next year's PaizoCon and GenCon will get a bigger recruiting push.
That would be good. I would think though, that pushing recruitment while alpha is running would be a good selling point. Most games are being pushed at that time since you can see that there will be a product.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Relevant but ambiguous:
Chemicals are extremely common, so have a much higher drop chance from nodes until a lot of them are gathered. If a bunch of people hit one of the mountain hexes and start gathering, you'll probably lower the Cinnabar ratings and increase the chance Iron Ore will drop.
I'm not sure whether to interpret that as "chemicals are tracked separately from metal ores", or "cinnabar is tracked separately from iron ore".
Gaskon's report earlier in this thread that "Each hex has a rating from 1 to 10,000 for each material type" is similarly ambiguous, without knowing exactly how granular 'material type' is.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As I said earlier, I'm no fan of getting annihilated out of nowhere, either. I played very briefly on an open world PVP server in EQ2. I quit and went back to the closed PVP server after a week, because I couldn't stay alive in the newbie zone long enough to level up past the "easy prey" stage. I'd get killed by people well above my level within a minute after logging into the zone, and it wasn't fun.
I'm just seeing some tension between "No, you can't opt out of nonconsensual PVP," and "Here's what we'll do too make unprovoked attacks very bad for the attacker."
When I deliberately go poking my nose into places where I know it doesn't belong, I don't want to be safe. If I'm helping my friends clear cut someone else's claimed hex, I don't think the owners should be discouraged from driving us away. That's categorically different from being slaughtered repeatedly in the newbie zone.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As I said earlier, I'm no fan of getting annihilated out of nowhere, either. I played very briefly on an open world PVP server in EQ2. I quit and went back to the closed PVP server after a week, because I couldn't stay alive in the newbie zone long enough to level up past the "easy prey" stage. I'd get killed by people well above my level within a minute after logging into the zone, and it wasn't fun.
I'm just seeing some tension between "No, you can't opt out of nonconsensual PVP," and "Here's what we'll do too make unprovoked attacks very bad for the attacker."
When I deliberately go poking my nose into places where I know it doesn't belong, I don't want to be safe. If I'm helping my friends clear cut someone else's claimed hex, I don't think the owners should be discouraged from driving us away. That's categorically different from being slaughtered repeatedly in the newbie zone.
The newbie zone stuff is just lame. There is no reason to do that or allow it in the first place.