Goblin Squad Member
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
I wrote this back in June:
Realistically, landed companies should not have to, and are not going to, deploy live defensive troops to their holding to just sit there guarding for the full duration of the PVP window. People want to play the game, not sit around idle. What that means is that the holding needs to have sufficient defenses to resist capture for several minutes while the defenders scramble to stop what they're doing (nearby, of course!) and go join the fight.
A mechanic like DAoC's where an attacker has to spend 10+ minutes battering a gate or two and defeating some NPC guards and a tower lord in order to capture the keep, and where the holding's owners are notified as soon as aggressive contact is made, means that property capture is likely to involve pitched battles and "meaningful human interaction". In contrast, a mechanic where a keep can be captured silently and quickly with no combat mechanic would minimize human interaction and lead either to a dynamic where people sit around bored not having fun to defend their towers, or give that up as a chump's game and just go tag into each other's holdings without ever reliably finding a fight.
I hope we can take this as a lesson learned from WoT and build the conflict systems for Holdings and Outposts with a little more... conflict.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
*Shakes Magic Orc Ball*
What are the winning lottery numbers?
My only fear is that the popular kids will just decide who gets to own what and everything will remain as static and conflict free as they are now.
How can devs thwart players who don't want to fight?
More importantly how are they going to entertain those folks, if the players won't create entertainment through conflict?
Of course, for the 32 or so people drawing the boundaries they at least get to play Diplomacy.
Will the rest of us just have to sit back and wait to hear what we've been apportioned?
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Will everything remain static and conflict free? No. If that were the case, we should all quit playing games and get into politics. But as soon as formal wars or feuds of any kind are introduced, they're going to get used and I bet the groups that are going to use them on day one already know who they are.
Will the rest of us just have to sit back and wait to hear what we've been apportioned? Start a revolution.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
My only fear is that the popular kids will just decide who gets to own what and everything will remain as static and conflict free as they are now.
How can devs thwart players who don't want to fight?
This is only a concern as long as it's possible to get everything you need without depriving someone else of resources they need. If there is meaningful scarcity there will inevitably be conflict.
Right now, there is no meaningful scarcity in the game; it's possible for everyone to have all the resources they can use, so there's nothing to fight over. It'll be interesting to see if tomorrow's patch changes that.
In the long term, I think the plan is that it should be challenging to supply your settlement's bulk resource needs from your own controlled outposts, so outpost raiding for bulks will become an important aspect of economic activity. And that'll lead to frayed tempers and general grumpiness, then fullscale war.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
You guys are not making proper use of your orcacle. No wonder Golgotha always loses to me in the battles I write up.
One of the reasons that scarcity isn't a concern is because the level of combat is so low that we don't burn through resources quickly.
It will be interesting to see if at the Outpost/Holdings point of the game we also see that peace is cheaper than war and thus peace causes more peace.
This may be the world's best conflict simulator for demonstrating the value of world peace. :-)
Will the rest of us just have to sit back and wait to hear what we've been apportioned? Start a revolution.
I don't see revolution, until settlements can be removed from the map by an attacking company.
And the longer we go without large scale conflict, the more time settlements have to amass defenses against upstarts who would destroy them (or newly created settlements who might oppose the NAP status-quo) months from now or a year from now.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
|
My only fear is that the popular kids will just decide who gets to own what and everything will remain as static and conflict free as they are now.
How can devs thwart players who don't want to fight?
More importantly how are they going to entertain those folks, if the players won't create entertainment through conflict?
Of course, for the 32 or so people drawing the boundaries they at least get to play Diplomacy.
Will the rest of us just have to sit back and wait to hear what we've been apportioned?
No. You're quite permitted to take whatever you can hold, or join an organization that doesn't agree to the distribution, or join an organization that does agree but doesn't hold their members to that agreement.
No. You're quite permitted to take whatever you can hold, or join an organization that doesn't agree to the distribution, or join an organization that does agree but doesn't hold their members to that agreement.
The first part works until you want to train.
However, if there exists even a single settlement that doesn't force people to toe the line on what the popular kids decided, then yes one can be a dissident, find conflict AND train.
My pessimism is occasionally relieved when I remember the words of a great man...
"Every day I get a little closer to just letting you guys kill everyone". :-)
Hey, I can dream...
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I believe outposts will be different than towers for a simple reason: you couldn't bank towers. If I needed 8 towers to maintain my training and I held 10, I couldn't bank the spare two towers time for a day when I held 6. With outposts, they actively produce resources, and resources can be banked for a rainy day. I can easily see people raiding outposts to build up a buffer for unexpected circumstances or to more rapidly grow their own settlement.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I've seen it mentioned before and I think I agree that scale of conflict is an issue. If we're all fighting full on wars against one another at the same time, all the time, that's pretty ridiculous. There needs to be an ebb and flow to large scale conflict, it can't be constant, much like constant peace can be bad. Periods of fighting need to be followed by periods of quiet to rebuild, recoup, and plan.
Even if the entire game was in a 'peaceful' state we would still need to be doing things around the world, gathering resources, moving them, putting down escalations, etc... Those are all opportunities for small scale conflict and that's what the majority of the day to day conflict should be, minor skirmishes or robberies, not wars and capturing territory.
The downside is this also requires enough population density that you have a decent chance to find someone if you are looking for a random person, but not so crowded that you can't move 10 feet without fighting someone else.
Also, winning a 'fight' with words is just as valid as winning with arms, some people focus so much on the act of fighting that they will look for any excuse to fight, even if they don't really need to, just to get the rush of beating someone. That mentality is just as bad as the one unwilling to fight at all.
And yes I agree WoT did not end up mimicking any of this, primarily because there was no ebb and flow aspect. It was all or nothing, but it was too easy to counter attack, and it didn't even matter that much due to population issues.
Stuff I agree with
I agree on winning the fight with words being just as important, but letting settlement leaders have all the fun is like sending out ONE champion to do battlefield combat.
It leaves the rest of us as spectators.
Do you know how I help my settlement win the battle of words (when those words are a bunch of treaties)? By the stuff I DON'T do.
I could just as easily not do that stuff while Netflix binging. :-)
As to ebb and flow... Eve-Online has that, and in fact I tend to resubscribe for the Winter War Season even if I hadn't made time for Eve the rest of the year.
It's easier to wait months though when you feel more certitude that war will happen eventually. I'm really a patient person, but in PFO I still lack any certitude that my patience will be rewarded.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Stuff I agree withI agree on winning the fight with words being just as important, but letting settlement leaders have all the fun is like sending out ONE champion to do battlefield combat.
It leaves the rest of us as spectators.
Do you know how I help my settlement win the battle of words (when those words are a bunch of treaties)? By the stuff I DON'T do.
I could just as easily not do that stuff while Netflix binging. :-)
As to ebb and flow... Eve-Online has that, and in fact I tend to resubscribe for the Winter War Season even if I hadn't made time for Eve the rest of the year.
It's easier to wait months though when you feel more certitude that war will happen eventually. I'm really a patient person, but in PFO I still lack any certitude that my patience will be rewarded.
Someone has to be a spectator sometime, that's the way of these things, we can't all participate in everything all the time. The key is to not make it the 'defacto' way to solve everything.
I totally want at least one decisive PFO battle to be decided by champions. That would be a great story.
Certainty is a problem, but I don't think there is much we can do with such an early and still being heavily developed game but bide our time and offer our views. I think rushing to try and force it with half baked mechanics is just as a bad as taking a year to deliver a conflict focused mechanic. It would be kind of hilarious if they introduce the first conflict mechanic and we somehow tear through all our supplies to discover we were not nearly as prepared as we thought we were.
We should avoid freaking out though, less fire and brimstone, more reasoned out logic and examples. Math is good, math speaks the truth.
You guys are not making proper use of your orcacle. No wonder Golgotha always loses to me in the battles I write up.How long have you been waiting for an opportunity for "orcacle"?
I don't have to answer that.
It would be kind of hilarious if they introduce the first conflict mechanic and we somehow tear through all our supplies to discover we were not nearly as prepared as we thought we were.
We could burn through the crafted stuff fast.
If we burn through all the +0 weapons the mobs have dropped, that *would* be hilarious, but it would also be gloriously fun getting to that point.
I have HUNDREDS of weapons banked. It would require THOUSANDS of deaths to break them all.
The tools for settlement warfare aren't ready for us yet. Chill a bit. You'll get your PvP.
My concern is whether the CULTURE for settlement warfare exists.
But yes, I'll be chillin' like a villain waiting for the answer to emerge this year.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
If we manage to create a system to work without conflict, the devs will start constraining resources and making upkeep more difficult to maintain. At some point, the peace will break for those who wish to remain influential to be able to keep the resources to hold the power to be influential.
I really think things will get more interesting when Upkeep comes into play. But it is only really going to matter if we get more growth in all of the settlements. The largest settlements in the game right now are considered 'small' compared to developer intention.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I think one of the problems with resources drain being to low is the high durability. Since the husk implenentation made the cost of dying higher than the loss of one durability (at least mine) dying frequency has dropped tremendously.
I think the whole resource to object chain need a bit of tuning. A variable durability depending on the quality of the goods pared with a more severe quality drop curve when materials get depleted due to gathering would nudge that a bit.
And I still need to find some time for getting my rig up and running at home so I could get some experience of PvP...
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Schedim, I propose caution with this. There is about zero PvP going on yet, and most of the durability loss is due to PvE deaths.
This makes people believe they have total control and they can actually keep sitting on their precious Dwarven Banded +1 Armor forever, while in fact they are wearing nothing more then a Consumable with 20 uses.
Once more people come into the game, and we get feuds, wars, factions, fights for Holdings and lots of banditry, this mindset needs to change into "hey, only churned through 3 armors this week, let me see if I have some more left in the bank".
It pains me to say this, since if there's anyone here that has learned to covet his precious "Lewtz" in Themepark MMO's without player-looting and durability loss, it's me.
Not saying everyone will churn through 3 armors a week, but in fact those that really want to put them to good use, most likely will.