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Thoughts?
I put some extra effort into this one considering i’ve taken a short break from streaming, i’ll continue to up the quality during this week off x
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Ashes of Creation is an Immersive huge open world Sandpark MMORPG that is redefining the gaming landscape. Created for fans of PVP, PVE, and Roleplay, this ever-changing world promises the ultimate MMO experience. This game, which began development in 2016 and upgraded to Unreal Engine 5 in 2021, is now on the cusp of revolutionizing the MMORPG genre. Intrepid Studios are working towards delivering these highly requested features to an old school playerbase waiting for that MMORPG to bring them back to the golden age of the early 2000s:9 different playable races with both male and female options.A massive 1200 square kilometer world size at launch with 85 Nodes.A fully open world game with no loading screens, offering complete freedom to explore.A rich array of features including Dungeons, Raids, World Bosses, Open World PVP, Caravan PVP, castle sieges, node sieges, arenas, duels, guild wars, and more.A vibrant player-driven economy, crafting and artisan system, political system, citizenship, player run shops, taverns with parlor games, and a unique character customization system.Ashes of Creation offers an experience like no other, combining the best elements of both sandbox and theme park MMOs. This is a game built by an MMO fan for MMO fans, fully funded and committed to a zero pay-to-win model.
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I put some extra effort into this one considering i've taken a short break from streaming, i'll continue to up the quality during this week off x
Come follow the stream for the return on thursday: https://www.twitch.tv/Narciverse
Top tier video
This game is like eve online but in an heroic fantasy world. Wonder if players are ready and enough motivated on the long term for that. Hope the devs are aware of all the implications.
Would would I, The Joker, care about anyone receiving any benefits?
this will most likely be a gankers paradise unless u dont use a caravan and dont use roads like albion xD
When I was watching the livestream, the first thing that came out to my mind was stream sniping. Imagine a situation where streamers with around 50 ~ 1000 avg viewers, spending 2h+ hours with his guildmates collecting materials for the caravan only to be lost right at the moment they're doing the caravan run by streamsniper guilds with 500+ players.
What people that dont have a serious Lineage2 backround cant understand is that the game will be about groups of 8, constant parties/CPs like we call them, that are part of big guilds, but those groups of 8, will be a team that farm together, defend together, making money together, owning multiple characters etc etc. So caravans will be mostly CP content, to make money. Now about other ppl attacking etc, in lineage2, and i am reffering there, because Steve was an L2 player, said many times L2 is one of the inspirations for AoC, and actually the whole pvp system with flag and corruption if you kill some unflagged is 100% L2 system, there is this HUGE aspect that is called politics. And politics in an open world mmo with pvp like that is EVERYTHING. CPs will have toons just to pk/kill other people, perma corrupted parked in their spots, means to come and harrass you in your farming etc etc. Friendship deals, money deals, legendary bosses etc will be huge factor. So after some time, dont expect people randomly attack caravans because there will be consequences!
This game is made with oldschool philosophy, for groups and socialization, open world pvp and pk, alliances and political backstabs, covered with some mambo jumbo theories to attract solo players.
I know for a fact that big clans and groups from L2 are waiting for these fun days, BUT STEVEN HURRY! AS TIME PASSES WE ARE GETTING SERIOUSLY OLDER!
"The risk is the unknown" … except my KNOW that attackers have zero risk lol
A massive issue I had with the game was the rock paper scissors combat (as explained). There is nothing more infuriating than being unable to outplay. I hope it isn't as how they describe. Sometimes requiring your content to be too socially focused can be to the detriment of players.
I think the main things to look at with regards to attacker/defender balance are respawning rules for PvP (in lieu of permadeath, maybe there is a very limited number of places where caravan attackers and other non-siege PvPers can respawn, which caravans can just avoid) and messing around with item drop rules (maybe you can lose your weapons on death or even get disarmed as an attacker). You could also have a more consequential durability system than most games, where durability can only be restored at friendly nodes but takes a very long time to wear down under normal circumstances, however PvP deaths erode it quickly so neither the attacker nor defender can just keep zerging at each other again forever.
They never said what happens after you choose the "Attack Caravan" option in the field instead of "Defend Caravan" and only mentioned that Bandit and Defender progression was available. They also never said what happens to your character after you sell stolen goods or certificates to a Black Market vendor. Only Gold was mentioned. My guess is, these two actions separate the Harrassers – from wanted Criminals – who become food for Bounty Hunter progression.
I saw the "The game doesn't exist" in really dark grey letters there at the end for a second… nice 🙂
Conquer the server, lets go!
Social MMO, yep. I hope that non-English-speaking players will be able to find what they're looking for with dedicated servers (German-speaking, French-speaking, Spanish-speaking, etc.).
Yes.
But I think y'all all going in KNOWING that.
If it's "ugly" it'll hurt the game some.
If it's "normal" stuff, and the game has systems in place to "deal with it" (in short; something ELSE to be doing to progress your Toon while you wait on said Griefers to move on.) it'll be fine.
Interesting video, I never thought about the social aspects of caravans. Especially the relationships between nodes and vassal nodes, should be interesting to see if that cooperation will exist in practice.
The beauty of social sandbox is that it's self correcting.
If a bunch of people are camping trade routes in groups, guess what, a second group will form and wipe them in predictable areas. Or the node will become shunned by traders and people will go elsewhere, which will result in the guild controlling the adjacent node/s will loose influence. So it's actually in the management's best interest to help traders in most cases. This will all spark PvP which is the whole point of the caravans being the "kickstarter" of the chain reaction of open world content.
Attackers have nothing to lose says who? It’s an alpha how do people come to conclusions already lol
AoC is shaping up for an exciting 2026 launch.
My biggest concern with the emphasis on the sociality of the game is the invasion of massive communities that will inevitably have the biggest footholds on launch. Yeah, it is engrained into the mechanics that you will want to incentivize your node to progress by being a place other want to come to. But what if you already have a community of 1000+ that are ALREADY there? Where is the risk in that community? Streamers like Asmon, Shroud, Tyler1, and many others already have a fanbase that will do just about anything they say. And on the guild recruitment forums there are massive guilds planning to monopolize nodes or guild castles. How is Intrepid giving those communities a 'risk" when they can zerg through every risk and obtain the most rewards?
The counter argument:
It would be wrong to say that there should be a punishment or a ball&chain on people who have worked really hard to build up their own community and want to play a game with them. I myself would like to have a guild for this game that quite literally doesn't exist so that I too can enjoy the rewards with my friends and have a foothold in a space of the game. It would be very unreasonable for the community to shut down my attempts at such and to shut down the successful growth of other communities. One of the ways people battle risk is through corporation and working together to achieve a common goal, whether that group is massive or a few people should be irrelevant
In short
Eventually, a community is going to become so big that there is no risk, but is that something that Intrepid needs to manage?
Caravans shouldn't be broadcasted as an event
Wait PUG was an acronym this whole time?!?!
AOC AOC AOC AOC AOC AOC AOC RAAAAAA IM SO TOXIC RAAAAAAAAA
It is interesting and I am glad they are trying to do something new with this. I am concerned with open world PvP in modern MMORPGs overall. I have not seen it actually work…ever. I think they should make sure combat is locked in and very responsive/fun to play first. The ability visuals also need to be toned down to make sure the entire game isn't a chaotic light show all the time in group content. Caravans are cool but I'm not sure if it will work (longterm) the way they are describing it.
All hardcore pvp MMOs are grief central and thats what ultimately causes the reduction of the playerbase by 95%
Hopefully
So whats the risk for the attackers now?
Why is no one else worried this game, the spell effects and armor look like they're from 2010?
Another core AoC mechanic intended for the top few guilds (strongholds being another, nodes etc. etc.)? How naive can they make this before they fold and make it 2024 (well, 2027) friendly
People worried about caravans have never played Null Sec in Eve Online. 40% mining and industry, 20% combat, and 40% getting to and from Jita. And we developed strategies to get there safely.
Rogue & rangers are going to be in high demand. Imagine, playing a Ranger class and doing ranger activities. Unheard of!!
Not completely true. I think Bandit nodes end up being sponsored by bigger nodes. But I think it just adds to the layers of political gameplay. The risk has to come from flagging I feel like.
So people like asmon will stroke their child like egos to power trip and stand tall over the peasants.
Thank you for bringing up these points, I definitely agree that it's an issue. What really bothers me though is that even Margaret mentioned the issue explicitly to Steven on stream, his response wasn't exactly reassuring. He basically said, "yes, caravan drivers take risks." Like… Yes, we know. We're wondering what risks the ATTACKERS have.
I also think the mass-invite random group setting for these battles is a bad idea. How's a group of random players without coordinated voice communication supposed to decided in a short period of time before the defenders respawn whose caravan is going to make the new pickup and where it's going to go? How're you supposed to trust the person making the delivery to pay you out fairly when they're the only ones who can see all the contents and can't even fully unload or sell the goods right away after delivering? Who's to stop one or two people from cracking open all the crates as soon as the zergfest is over and ruining any chance of a caravan payout?
I agree that reputation will carry some weight, but we're talking about a massive game with thousands of players online at a time. All it takes is one or two people on the assault team that you didn't even organize to start cracking crates to ruin the raid for everyone who wanted to try and complete the delivery. I think player-driven-caravan PvP needs to be pre-made groups only with multiple attacking teams going up against each other and the defenders at the same time. That way, you can communicate effectively with, form plans with, and actually trust all the people you're grouped with.
Even then, we're still left with the issue of how attackers should take an equivalent amount of risk to the defenders, as well as how to limit the number of people allowed to attack the defenders if multiple attack groups are allowed… Tricky.
Best I can think of for the attacker limit is a soft cap. If there are spaces left below the soft cap, you can go up to five over with your group, but if the soft cap is reached or exceeded by any group, then you'll be rejected. So the max number of people you'll ever be attacked by will only be a full raid size give or take like 5 people. Any other group too big to join will be rejected with a message telling them the number of spots left below the max cap.
As for Risk v Reward, I think that the reputation argument can be made much, much better if we eliminate the random group dogpiling and instead require pre-mades for caravan attacks. That way the groups, who're most likely spearheaded by different guilds, can be held accountable.
Make attackers fully lootable 🙂
I agree, that having a black market/fence will rather be detrimental to a node unless it is used very frequently. That would mean though, that there are a lot of thieves/highwaymen/robbers in that area and honest merchants avoiding it.
That also leads to robber raids having to travel further to find caravans and having to travel a long way back to the home node(more risk of being raided themselves).
One more thing you didn't mention is the sheer size of the map. So many wannabe thieves dream of the outlaw life of robbing one caravan after the other and swimming in gold. I rather see groups of thuglifers being bored in the woods while waiting for a caravan to come by and if one appears, being to scared to attack because the defenders look too strong. Big raids waiting for prey are easy to spot and you only need one post in area chat to spoil the spoils.
One more thing, we haven't heard about much is the bounty hunter system. I don't think, it will necessarily be only tied to the corruption system. Wouldn't make much sense. Killing corrupted is already easy and rewarding in itself. You don't get corruption from attacking a caravan, but they never said that there will be no penalty at all. You might get a bounty on your head, that reveals the general area, where you're at. If you keep robbing, it might even reveal your exact location. So the risk for a successful attack, might be, that you have an assassin on your heels for a week. I mean, it would make sense. Who has bounties on their head? Killers? Thieves? Highwaymen?
The node system is not going to stop caravan ganking. The nodes get xp from adventurers questing. The Caravan does not help nor hinder that. I feel you believe that people will be more likely to quest in areas where a large guild/group is patrolling and repelling Caravan attacks, but there is nothing saying a guild like that would be in power in any major node. The only node type that holds elections is the Scientific type.
I love this idea of Kingdoms vs Kingdoms. Certain nodes might be a highly contested PVP zone and the mayor has to send resources to build up defenses for that city while they war with a neighbor. On the flip side you could have two allied kingdoms that support each other incase a large scale war breaks out. Bandits from waring factions could disrupt trade routes around these contested nodes.
The risk is wasting time. If you sit around all day waiting to gank caravans, and you happen to find one, and you happen to succeed, then you’ve still wasted an entire day for a single caravan, when you could have just done something else more profitable.
I think what we primarily need are incentives for defenders to engage in defending the "kingdom" they inhabit.
I could easily see myself travelling through the realm I call home and defending caravans for days. Its just a nice fantasy and sounds like fun for people who like pvp.
But if thats a net negative, because I can't even cover my repair costs by defending poor bastards for free who cannot afford mercs, then that will have its limits.
I don't struggle to imagine some node faction who has special rewards for stuff like that though.
@12:15 ok so if my caravan is going to be valuable, I better invest even more resources to provision it increasing the risk even more for reasons. I need to bring as many people as possible to guard against the gankers or even hire mercenary guilds BUT I also need to make sure information is restricted to a CLOSE circle of friends who all happen to be online at the 'unique' time I chose to launch the caravan to avoid as many people online as possible, good thing none of us have jobs or other real life obligations. Got it, easy-peasy. A great answer to the question "how will risk vs. reward be balanced for both the caravan attackers and defenders". It'll be fine.
Envious will be so large they will send a percentage of people to live in and spy for neighboring vassals to sabotage node growth in order to grow their main group.
It won't be the Envious node preying on its own vassals, it will be Envious running the vassals and neighboring kingdoms being the primary target. It's the same problem, you just need to zoom out a little.
i love risk v reward so much (i played alot of albion) that i forgot that there might be a reward. My motto: Kerngedanke, REIN! – Core tought, GOING IN! Often spent millions on top quality gear that would make gankers straight up nut when they see me for pvp, only to jump into the masses to drop my dmg and come out of the quick engage with my nutsack missing.
Here's my Power Fantasy: Node Sieges and Guild-v-Guild combat will probably evolve to hinge on a strategic resource, without which engaging in a war is doomed to failure. Top tier siege weapons, top-tier PVP potions, etc. These will require expert gatherers, processors, and crafters to produce. One of those three will be a bottleneck (I suspect Processing, since that's Freehold-bound) and whomever is able to control that bottleneck will in effect be the kingmakers on the server. Since they'll almost certainly be Artisan-skill focused players and not combat specialists, they won't be able to directly intervene, but they can encourage hardcore guilds to siege something down or whatever else with promise of the necessary resources to do it. I think that's pretty exciting and I hope that's possible within the structure of the game.
Some sort of bounty system would be interesting. Attackers needing to pay bounty for source <-> destination targets of caravans and be blacklisted there until bounties paid. Make the bounty amount based on the overall value of the caravan being attacked and put on when the attacker dies.
To add more flavor to it and actually provide some benefit of beating attackers, can make a portion of the bounty be paid off to defenders as "compensation".
Or something similar where attackers lose all durability on all their equipped gear when killed by defenders, and gold cost of repair be given to defenders as loot. No gold being dropped from the attacker directly, but ends up being the attacker loses gold to defender since they need to spend the same gold to repair their gear. This I think brings a bit of Albion flavor into the mix where attackers coming with better gear potentially will lose more "gold", but similarly provide more gold to defenders. This incentives high quality defenders beating high quality attackers. Similarly, attackers that decide to zerg with more people, worse gear, has challenges of having more people for once, and their disadvantage against smaller numbered but more powerful defenders.
Actually the more I think about this the more this sounds like it'd be an AWESOME risk/reward balance that'll really make caravans have so much variety.
In a nut shell:
-Attackers lose $$ if they die.
-Defenders get extra $$ for beating attackers.
We can look at some of the balance here by how the value of the caravan is calculated to the attackers losses. For example, calculate it based on # of defenders:
For 10 defenders, each attacker death has a repair/bounty cost of %10 of Caravan value.
Where as for 20 defenders, it's a %5 cost.
Meaning attacking a caravan that has more defenders, hast less of a loss for attackers that die, but more if attacking caravans with less defenders.
For attackers, the less numbers they have, the higher their share will be, but based on the # of defenders, the higher or lower their cost will be. Makes a small group of strong pvpers have less loss dying to large groups of defenders, while having higher potential profit from winning, but a higher chance to lose from being out numbered.
On the flip side, attackers dealing with a smaller group of defenders have a higher chance to win, but also higher losses if they die. Making small groups of elite defenders also viable. If they're getting attacked a larger group of attackers, each of those attackers will have a very high loss at death due to low defender count.
We can further balance this by locking caravan attack and defender groups so this can't be abused.
Caravan defenders locked to "x" number of defenders when the Caravan form, who GAIN BIG BOUNTY for betraying the caravan. Implement pvp damage tracking so defenders who are throwing, are counter as having betrayed the Caravan.
Same for attackers, where their Caravan group is locked at "x" number, as in within the group/raid limits of the game, as well as the number being locked in for some maybe 15-30 minutes prior to being able to attack Caravans.
INHALES COPIUM. PLEASE IMPLEMENT THAT!!!!
The problem with this caravan PvP event is: Either you show up with a large clan and protect the caravan. All the attackers see, that there are sitting 50+ people on the caravan and protect it, so they don't engage into it, when they are severely outnumbered. In this scenario 50+ people are doing nothing for several hours until the caravan reaches its destination.
Or some other large clan sees this loot piñata and shows up with 100+ people and just curb stomp the guarding clan. For maximum moral damage, they wait for as long as possible and stop the caravan close to its target location and then just break open the chests to ruin the whole thing. (and I'm not pulling this out of my ass, I've witnessed drama like this in other MMOs. There's a lot of people that get a lot of fun out of just ruining other peoples days. Literally mindset of "ruin fun for others" > "in game profits")
So the protector will basically always have a frustrating game experience. Either they get to experience maximum boring guarding with no action. Or they will probably get curb stomped by a much larger attacker after having "wasted" a lot of time with guarding the caravan. Or did I miss some overarching mechanic, that'll prevent these scenarios from being the prime PvP caravan experience?
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Fun fact: In human history battles were rarely fought with similar soldier numbers. Usually it was a slaughtering where one side had many more men than the other. So this behaviour is very natural, smart and makes a lot of sense. But as most of the time "real life logic stuff" doesn't translate into fun game play in a virtual world space.
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I hope our @Narc reads this and will give his opinion on it.
"griefers paradise" LOL you PVE losers can go play something else. This game is being made after the likes of ArcheAge! The best PVP MMO ever made.
Been spending most of our lives living in a griefer's paradise