So about forced multiplayer sieges...

Justice system

 

All they ever needed to do was change "friends online" to "mixed" mode. Mixed mode would be Multi in towns, solo in instances. Have that be the default mode. The majority of players would be unlikely to ever change off that mode. But they promised and sold us an SPO experience that they removed, and it was a major selling point for some of us.

 

Most people would still choose Private and the world would once again seem empty.

 

Dam thats still happening? Last time you crashed like 3 times in 20 minutes.

 

*If* it's true that most people would be in private all of the time, then that says a lot about how much SPO was desired. The steamcharts, while not a representation of the total population, does track the ups and downs of population overall from which you can extract a general idea of where the game is going. And the promised permanent bump in population because "new players could see other players on the map" didn't manifest.

 

I'm not going to go around in circles about this but you and I both know that an MMO with an empty world does not help attract new players and yes, I see many more new players now.

 

You can't compare it because someone eating a meal probably bought his meal, you didn't buy your space in the siege, since it is a public zone.

Who established this rule? Is it you? Is there by chance a regulation that establishes this?

This behavior is something that happens in real because this how human being is.

In games such as these where the player can shape the world, the behavior typical of reality is often reproduced and this a strong point of this kind of games. I agree with you, harassing, griefing and any negative behavior shouldn't be incentivized, at the same time it shoudn't be prevented but punished; you can have a negative behavior but you will have consequences.


Here are my thoughts:

• If you grief mobs of someone else, you will be flagged PVP for 1 hour.
• If you have a negative behaviour in PVP, griefing people while fighting mobs, pickpocketing, killing a player with positive karma ( of course here we need a justice system ) you can't leave the zone for 15 minutes, can't remove the PVP flag, can't switch to friend mode and you can teleport just to the town where you are bound for 2 hours.

 

Hi Kaeshiva,

Thankyou for your thoughtful reply. Open discourse that sticks to topics and facts is a good way for people of differing ideas to respectfully work out understandings and solutions. It actually is a lot more complicated than most would think, which is why we seem to have the same arguments repeatedly without coming to any true solutions.


1. Again, this is subjective, and of course I was being a little facetious, but the serious point here is, many people don't care if it's rude, and don't care if anyone thinks this is rude, they are on a totally different agenda. I agree it is a bad change for people who liked it the way it was before, I like it as it is now, for different reasons. Going back to a statement you made earlier about 'should you get your friends and make a party and everyone try to loot the corpse before the others can get it?' , yes, yes, you should, if you actually compete for what you want, sometimes you will find that the competition goes away and does something else when they see that you don't just roll over, get mad, and leave.

2. Splitting hairs? yes, that's the point.

3. Troll instance is private, yes, but getting into the troll instance isn't.

4. I define it as 'competitive', 'aggressive', 'dominant', and I don't find anything negative with those terms. There are sieges all over the map, are you targeting specific sieges for certain cabalists on purpose and upset that others are doing the same? If sieges are private again, cabalist hoods would lose what little remaining value they have left, since everyone who wants a dolus hood can farm dolus privately all day long with no interuptions. The drop rate would be the same, but there would be a much higher percentage of dolus cabalist being killed, and therefore higher supply than currently.

5. I appreciate that you think that you support PvP, I hope that you appreciate that I think that I support what makes you happy in this game. But it is a limited support that you offer, because you don't mind something separate for pvp, as long as it only affects pvp. This is not any different than me not minding that sieges aren't forced pvp, as long as they are open only.

Here again subjectivity comes into play, because the sieges are indeed a pvp issue to me. The scene itself is neither pvp nor pve, the people who enter it make it what it is to them. It is something different to you than it is to me, and neither of us have a right to disparage the other's gameplay.


I feel for ya, in a sense, but I can't vote for you, because it will take away one of the few recent refreshing things that actually has started to provide more of the 'game that I backed' (to quote yourself) which was a multi-player pve/pvp game.

Thank you for the open discourse, I understand the direction you were going with your thread. I happen to disagree with what you want done, for reasons that are different than what you base your arguments on. I'm not trying to argue with you as much as simply putting my views out there for any devs who might also being reading this thread. After all, we should have all viewpoints represented, anything less would be rude, wouldn't you say?

 

And as a quick follow up, If there actually were real pvp incentivized areas in this game, with things of value that weren't limited to 'pvp use only', I wouldn't care at all about the sieges being private or open. I and every other pvp'er would have more than enough to do than to worry about what you did or so called 'ganking' which is a whole other discussion.

If more of the people who felt like you, could actually truly support the pvp population just once in a meaningful way, and support something we wanted, without the standard, 'but what if I want that item and I don't like to pvp?' refrain, this game would have the population and support to give us all what we wanted. The fault that this game doesn't have a more robust SPO game or can no longer support the development time to support other modes or features has a lot more to do with dollar logistics than anything else.

 

Yes Jack and its nice to be able to discuss something like this reasonably. I certainly appreciate the complexity of the issue that this (and the wider PvP question) cause. I think its pretty agreed that no single implementation or set of rules is going to make everyone happy - force PvP on the PvErs, outrage. Force more and more PvE grind on the folks who just wanna do their PvP thing, equal outrage. Being completely honest, if I was here for a PvP game and that was my main priority, I'd be torches and pitchforks too with the state that its in. I'm not afraid to admit that the PvP side needs a lot of work, to bring it first, to a level that the PvP-priority players would enjoy, and secondly, to a level where it can be enjoyed by people who would do it occasionally, if not all the time (which is where I fall).

I'm not against "competition" as such, in fact I think adding contested pve content would be an interesting twist. But there are certain fundamentals that I think need to be addressed first, i.e. loot drop rates. Are people going to fight over a world spawn that has a 1% chance to drop something? Once the novelty wears off? Probably not. In the end, it will be the elite soloists who track and kill it and sell it to the rest of the playerbase until everyone who needs it owns it and the price goes into the toilet. Like most loot.

Our current loot/reward system, flawed as it is, does let the player choose how they want to spend their time. For example, if I need a Dolus Hood, I could do as you say - I could form my own Dolus Party and go "compete" over it, but with the drop rate being as poor as it is, it just ends up wasting a lot of time. I could do this for days and walk away with nothing. I'd be better off just letting the people who wanna farm it, farm it, and I'll buy it with money I can earn in far less time/effort spent doing something else.

For me personally, it boils down to : its a game, I'm here for fun and recreation, not hassle and strife. I want to play the game, not police it. I sincerely want them to implement -something- that gives players something to truly fight over, whether it be a cause, or faction, or whatever, to give purpose and outlet for people who seek competition. Unfortunately, the nature of anything competitive is you need someone to compete -against- , which is difficult when you have people who don't want to compete at all.

My main motivation for this thread as stated, was that this behavior is escalating, its upsetting people, and I'm not sure if that was the intended purpose behind the change or indeed if the benefit of the change outweighs the negativity associated with it. Trying to take a guildmate to get them catalysts or cabalists and running into this problem over and over nearly every time we enter a siege, when they've only got a short window of time to play, ends up with them logging off frustrated with the game in general.

Its always going to be a balancing act, the right of one player to not be harassed vs. the right of another player to enjoy harassing because that's their "playstyle." You could quite correctly say that if the game allows it, its not wrong. We could argue all day about which way would "attract more players" or "retain more players" but I think we both know that such arguments are moot. My personal moral compass is one that seeks to avoid conflict rather than start it. I can respect that yours is different.

 

I agree with regards to the dollar logistics, although I don't necessarily think that PvE incentives for PvPers is going to be the miracle fix here.

Being completely fair, there are a lot of items that are locked behind the forced PvP wall already, and if someone wants the item without wanting to PvP, they can buy it. That's already happening now with dungeon rooms from the fall. My objection is that by adding PvE carrots in a PvP scene, you are telling the PvE community that if they want this better xp, or this item, or whatever it is that's in there, that they need to flag up or pay up. That is NEVER going to be received well.

Rather than dreaming up ways to push more people who aren't interested to participate, I'd rather see a PvP system that would entice people to participate. I reject that such enticement has to be monetary or instant gratification either.

Imagine if you will, that there was a blessing that you could get (like the 3 day blessings, but perhaps shorter duration) that was only in the shardfall. This blessing could say, double your attenuation threshold to 200% for say...3 hours. Whatever. Benefit to PvErs? Sure. But not a dealbreaker for most people by any means. I expect something like this would be desirable to PvPers because they don't wanna do the PvE grind thing any more than necessary, its just a means to an end. You'd probably get some victims from it, but the people this appeals more to are the people with a more similar mindset. I don't think this would ruffle TOO many feathers.

What I mean by PvP benefit is, say that killing mobs in the shardfall granted "additional" xp that could only be used to level a set of PvP-related passive skills (things related to stealth, damage/defense against players, etc. Perhaps even a passive that raises the XP cap!) You might get some 'on the fence' folks like myself in there to level the skills a moderate amount, but it doesn't feel obligatory. And you'll have the folks that will never pvp under any cirumstances who would continue to avoid it. And that's fine too. There are a lot of ways that PvP can be incentivized without making it mandatory.

 

That was a great post, and I think really offers a much more complete and honest picture of where come from as a gamer and what you are looking for in the time that you invest. A lot of what you just said above, I agree with completely.

The growth and development of games has led us to expect everything at once and to demand injustice and unfairness when our expectations meet realism. The growth and development of human desire and response has basically been non-existant since the beginning. There is nothing new under the sun, and never will be.

Due to reasons of mistakes made in the past, we are where we are at this time. We can only move forward with the deliberation to succeed. I honestly have more faith in the determination (desperation?) of the devs to succeed now, than almost any time in the past before they had their 'come to jesus moment' last year.

This game has and has plans for a lot of completely unbelievably systems with depth that will blow our minds in 10 years, and our fledgling start will be a joke of the past. The devs got off to a great start, hit some rocky patches, overloaded the wagon, had too many backseat drivers, almost turned it over, but they have righted it, and while going a little more cautiously and understandingly, they have developed, and set the stage to develop some awesome and unique gaming experiences that are going to bring people in by the boat load, wondering how they ever missed this game in the first place.

The best I can do for you to be supportive of you while not agreeing with your position is to say don't sweat the small stuff, and rudeness is the small stuff because you nor anyone else will ever change subjective assumptions, and to say that if I personally ever 'crash your siege' just say 'HEY, i'm Kaeshiva, don't be RUDE LOL' and i'll respectfully leave you be, as opposed to my normal stance of just not caring.


aka
Grumpy Krabnevir

 

Not having read all the comments: I thought this was done to try to bring people together. This isn't to say this was a good choice. But I always had the impression the population was too segregated and they wanted to move people together. Unfortunate that this is an unintended consequence. I also imagine spinning up separate instances of a zone was probably costing too much in terms of equipment.

 

Oh I don't know about that.. they would have had to account for that from the beginning if they planned on having a larger active population. If it was too much of a burden with a lower population than that would be a sign of some potentially serious issues in the technology.

 

Sorry, not buying that excuse.........

 

I was pretty happy with them making overworld and towns multiplayer only. Ever since then the game has never felt as desolate and lonely as it did before, which is a huge deal. When i saw @kaeshiva online and tried to go do hello stuff only to find that even tho 5 people would be in town but really they werent, its was very depressing. I’d go into towns with 2 houses on (which meant more than 3 people i think) to find folks only to find every single townwas empty. And most of the folks i asked said it was simply because it was easier to stay in party only mode instead of switching every time they came to town

I dont care if soeges and encounters are able to be single player, its mainly social environments like towns that didnt make sense to be single player while playing in online mode.

But sounds like anything combat related should be Optionally private.

 

No, they sold a game where they specifically advertised that you would have the option to play by yourself in all instances, and it was called Single Player Online. After the repeated disappointing population levels, a bunch of players advocated that SPO be mostly removed from the game, in the belief that making it so everyone was forced to be together on the map and in towns would magically cause new players to want to stick around on the game, because otherwise what they mostly saw was an empty world. The latter part is more the fault that the game completely lacked a mixed mode that would function as things do now -- Multiplayer on the map and towns, solo in instances. They could have just done that, and left SPO alone. They have made other real QoL improvements that may help the game, but they've also put off fixing serious issues that are brought up repeatedly by new players as reasons for having problems with the game, such as the god-awful (and still pretty broken) questing system.

The change to forced multiplayer has not had the result being sought, either. But it has driven away long time players who brought a lot to the game, such as @Browncoat Jayson, who runs the sotawiki site. We need people like that actively playing the game, not being driven away by the removal of features that were heavily advertised and sold to the customers who backed this game (and which didn't have the result intended after being removed).

 

LOL @ "shroud of the loading screens"

def still my #1 pain point...

 

Meh, its good now. Loading scene takes less time than it takes to use zone scroll.

 

Not to derail this thread, but the memory management in relation to scenes on Ubuntu Linux is horrible. Its the most non performant software I have ever used in this regard. More than 2 loading screens = 100% utilization of 16GB of RAM, and then writing to almost 2GB of swap space before I quit SotA, get my memory back, and restart the entire application.

Loading one scene causes my memory consumption to skyrocket. Loading a second scene usually uses 100% memory then some swap space. Also my GPU memory is usally spiked high or 100% utilized as well. This happens during the loading screens, so while they do load quickly, I still associate them with this barrier to a smooth gameplay experience. Restarting the client constantly has been the norm for me for 5 years now, though I am pretty used to it.

I would still prefer to suffer the experience of loading scenes and rebooting the client than suffer windows, though. Praise be to Portalarium for offering a Linux client in the first place!!!! I am going to upgrade to 32GB RAM soon expressly to alleviate my SotA loading screen memory pig issues.