Party of 12

Please get on QA and help test out the new 12 person parties.

 

Absolutely !
I know my guild is going there in force - mostly for that purpose.

 

I went to QA last night and only 1 person on my friends list sniffle. hard to test when none were on.

 

We had a guild group of 12 there from around 9pm central to 10:30. Most things did work well. Issues seem to revolve around screen resolution settings causing some player health bars to drop off the screen to the left making it difficult for healers. Also, some spells seem to have a limit on how many players can be affected (Purify Burst for example seems to only affect 10 players max - though 12 were in range).

Other than that - it's a nice addition. First time in ages that every guildmember online was able to attend the hunt without someone being left out.

 

Amen, brother, amen.

 

ODE and the Lancermanes were on QA last night (Friday 3/6/20) testing out the new 12 party system. The following are some comments on the new changes to 12 players.

I have use a 32" TV screen for playing the game which is what I would think many players do. My resolution is kind of stuck at 1360 X 768, 60Hz. First thing that was obvious was that as you add names to the Party the list gets longer and longer on the screen, When we got up to 10 Players added to the Party I could only see the name of the player and not the second line of health bars or location. Player 11 was totally below viewing on my screen. Those using screens with the capability of getting to 1920 X 1080 were not having this problem. Once I brought out my Pet and it appeared below my name, the 10th name also disappeared below viewing level. I can afford to purchase a 4k TV which will probably solve my problem, however you might find a number of players with older monitors or like me using TV monitors. We never got to add a 12th name since he was constantly be kicked from the game.

Another Point was that when I tried to use the F# keys to Select a person, they seemed to be highly eratic. Sometimes they would come up to the right of my Player name and other times they would flash on and then quickly disappear. It seems if I moved back and forth between the F# key that corresponded to the name above or below the one I was trying to activate I could eventually get the name to come up and stay without flashing off.

Opinion Section:

As a Side note. We had 3 Melee players at the Control Point. All remarked about how it felt like Mana was being drained much faster than usual. There was a question as to whether we were losing more mana just because it was a Control Point. I did some testing on the LIVE server this morning and the mana drain is the same at the Control Point as it is on my Combat Dummy. HOWEVER, when the Zombies came out they totally wiped out my mana in a matter of seconds. I realize that efforts are being made to keep down the max Experience at these Control Points but the effect of the Zombies on Melee Players is drastic and affects only the Melee Players who stay in the middle and become the Zombies main target. Melee Players already, in these Control Points, do far less damage than any other fighting class. To add these Zombies is to me adding insult to injury. the Auto attack on Melee players is already 10 times lower than any Archers Auto Attack using no Mana and ridiculously low when compared to Mages using Fire Field or Meteor Storm since they are never subjected to the zombie scourge. Please, I do not want this to turn into a Nerfing issue. I have posted on the Forums in the past that I believe that once the players are given something it should never be taken away. I'd rather not have any changes made to improve Melee if it meant Nerfing some other spells or profession.

Another issue in regard to the new 12 player party system is the distribution of Experience Points. I would think that we would want to encourage groups to bring as many players as possible (12) along with them when they do Control Points or Tougher MOBS. I would think we would want to involve mid-level players to go along and improve their skills and have them actively seeking out groups to go with. Problem is that when the Experience Points continue to go down, and the time gets further extended to reach Attenuation it becomes too easy for Groups to limit the number of Players in their Group. As an example look at the Looking For Group (F2) just about any time during the week. Group leaders frequently limit the number of players hey want in a group to between 4 - 6, sometimes just to hold open spaces for guild members which is fine but other times because with a smaller group they can do a Control Point and reach Attenuation Faster. Even with our group, which was fairly strong, we did not Attenuate within an hour. Our Experience was good at 4+ million in an hour but we can generally do 5 million in 45 - 50 minutes with 8 players in the party. I would think having larger groups should be encouraged and possibly give more Experience after a certain number. At the very least not continue to reduce after 6 or 8 players.

 

@Gamician - interesting comments, when they first discussed 12-man parties this was my initial thought that in most places, even at CPs, a full party of 8 the exp split is already pretty lean. I agree with your assessment that we should not be putting up obstaacles/disincentives to grouping which seems to be the natural result of this - keeping group size as small as possible or groups unwilling to allow players beneath a certain level or 'dps threshold' is becoming the norm. And you can't really blame people for wanting their grind to be as efficient as possible - many games do not 'split' experience in this way for this reason. Many newer games even go further to give everyone their own loot drops, so that there are no 'downsides' to bringing more people, as doing so does not diminish everyone's gain.

 

One of the main reasons why the party size increase was requested was to enhance large scale PvP battles. Hopefully two versions are worked.

Version 1) 12 man PVE and Version 2) 24 man raid PvP as GM potion to avoid the friendly fire chaos of our 4 large wars.

Glad to see at least version one being tested on QA.

R/Boris/El Pirata

 

So you think with a SMALL amount of PVP members, your going to get 24 of them on at the same time and willing to go into a PVP battle like this???

This helps out the larger groups for PVE because we constantly have more than 8 people that want to go out to control points, fight bosses, etc. and this is where it helps out the most.

 

Maybe you were not part of the large battles we HAD in the past, 4 to be exact and of which @Chris streamed one of them. We HAD between 50 - 100 players fighting and limited to groups of eight in each party. Maybe if you had participated in these events YOU would know better than to throw that out there like you did. I also agree it could help with PVE specially if we have future large scale town invasions such as the ones promoted by Port and Travian games culminating in the battle of Aerie. A large group of us realized that friendly fire was the biggest detractor of large PVP battles. Also realize that Castle Sieges are in the plans for Q4 so this serves as a dual purpose and by the way I also enjoy and hope @Elgarion will GM some large scale NPC city invasions for those of us who also like PVE. R/Boris/El Pirata.

 

The word on the street from some die hard pvpers I know is that this "12 man" group change is meaningless because there are bigger things wrong with pvp as well as pve. They say those issues should be addressed first but they are not being addressed so they dont have big Hope's for the group size change..... I tend to agree with them....

 

Also just to mention is the party size can be for other things. I've had a need for more than 8 when syncing a song that called for 10 or more parts to be played. So again I can see many needs for larger parties. We have waited a very long time for this. The dragon invasion travian hosted was awesome to see happening to this game. Imagine if basic game features would have been in effect at the time.

It was absolutely amazing to see a call to arms for a save the world type of thing. Even Solo players came running. Then of course they could then go back to solo play.

It was an exciting 1st attempt. Not having a raid system and a timed Battlegroud ground with quests was a mistake as was no implementation of an in game achievement/task system.

 

I agree there are a lot of things wrong with PVP. This larger party size was but one attempt to address it, what else can be done to fix PVP is beyond me. Maybe those hardcore PVPers do have to come up with the solution and present it to Chris to see what can be done. Though I am currently retired from the PvP large battle promotion business, I would like to see it succeed as wsll as the type of town invasions that @majoria70 spoke about. Wait and see is all we can do at this point. R/Boris/El Pirata

 

Polish isn't a strength of theirs. I wasn't surprised to see these issues, but at the least, it's going to be nice having the option of more people in a party. While everyone can agree that it should be completely finished when released into production, we're happy with the addition no matter the finished state it's in.

 

Pvpers suggest feedback and contents from like 4 years, seems like there is no interest from Chris to work on it, not sure if it is cause He has not the "tech" or cause atm almost all the Pvper left due to removal of ransom ( only incentive we had to pvp) and lack of contents.