Angelmar

UPDATE: In particular looking for support/healers and highly actives. Message me on discord. Willing to open up a few additional recruitment slots.

UPDATE: Recruitment for new players is re-opening on a limited basis. We are looking to add ~5+ new recruits. Please contact Angelmar on our discord or PM me here with short background and interest in -W-. We specifically are looking for highly active players to join us in dregs. Recruitment by referral remains open for alpha veterans, old friends/opponents, and/or folks with a historical connection to Winterblades.

Organized leadership team and good crew of players.

Hello Ashen! Long time. Hopefully we get another decade out of Crowfall.

Nice roaming by Balfizar

Winterblades is recruiting for Crowfall launch on July 6! After almost six years of playing the Crowfall alpha we are excited to finally get Launch! If you are a veteran of the alpha or new to Crowfall and interested in joining us, contact us in our public discord. (Sending in an app on the CF website without contacting us in discord will not get you an interview.) The Winterblades have 20+ years of history across various PVPMMOs and have been focused on Crowfall since its kickstarter. Building on our victories from the alpha in all the 11 Trials of the Gods and numerous campaigns we look forward to contesting the field once again against new friends and foes alike joining the Crowfall community for launch. UPDATE: Recruitment for new players is re-opening on a limited basis. We are looking to add ~5+ new recruits. Please contact Angelmar on our discord or PM me here with short background and interest in -W-. We specifically are looking for highly active players to join us in dregs. Recruitment by referral remains open for alpha veterans, old friends/opponents, and/or folks with a historical connection to Winterblades. A New Chapter Begins: We raise our banners for Crowfall and begin the latest campaign in our long history. Crowfall is the long awaited successor to Shadowbane and Darkfall, and Winterblades has been one of the most active guilds in the Crowfall Alpha from day one. Stable leadership, focused on creating a low-drama community focused on enjoyable openworld PvP, has made Winterblades a guild that has survived through seventeen years and multiple games. Around our core of veterans, we are inviting new recruits with a Guild-First attitude. Join us for the battles ahead as we approach Crowfall release and beyond. Who Are The Winterblades? The Winterblades is a community whose core membership was forged in the crucible of Shadowbane. The community has been around in various forms since Ultima Online in 1998, but entered into a new era with Shadowbane in 2003. Over the years, through skill, determination, and dedication, the guild developed into one of the most respected communities in Shadowbane. In Darkfall, Winterblades, along with The Shipwrecked Pirates formed the core of the leadership of Shadowbane Alliance based out of the Winterblades capital of Erinthel. Our History is an open book. From the dark days of defeat to the heights of victory and server domination, we’ve endured and grown. The strength of the Winterblades is the strength of our membership. We have always favored quality over quantity and do not mass recruit. We have a highly veteran membership, including multiple Shadowbane Community and Class Advocates and a deep bench of leadership with long experience with in game politics and the trials of open world pvp gaming. Our community is low-drama and dedicated and has been gaming together for over 17 years. The respect the Winterblades have enjoyed amongst our former foes is one of our greatest badges of honor. Our success on the battlefield, our stability as a guild, and the quality of our leadership can be measured not only by the members, but by the actions of our former rivals. We have had multiple guilds, that were once amongst our foes, sub or merge into the Winterblades after meeting us on the field. Victory is important, but how that victory is achieved is also crucial. We let our conduct speak for us. Maturity, Class, and Respect have always been important to us. How to Apply: If you are interested in joining Winterblades for the Campaign World tests pm Angelmar on the forums or join us in our public discord. We are only accepting applications from testers with access to testing at this time. During the testing and for live we will be focused on USTZ servers. We are also taking applications for any European gamers that want to play on the US servers. Interested players can join us on the field and run with us in Campaign World tests. There is a probationary period of 60-90 days currently where both the guild and the applicant have a chance to audition each other. Final decisions on ultimate recruitment will be based on field performance and most importantly how well you mesh with the rest of -W-. Our door of course remains open to former allies and enemies (and especially to individuals that were both!) from Shadowbane and Darkfall. Rulesets, Eternal Kingdoms, and the Unknown: The ultimate mechanics of the Crowfall campaign system are still largely unknown. Winterblades will be playing on whatever ruleset becomes the Guild v Guild platform (likely dregs) along with most the rest of the greater Shadowbane community. -W- will be there as the new systems come online PvPing, testing, and shaping Crowfall as it nears release. The mechanics of the Eternal Kingdoms (and how they will interact with the Campaign Worlds) are also still essentially open questions. Winterblades will always be focused on PvP and the Campaign Worlds (and maybe PvP in the EK!). The economic interaction between the Dregs and EKs is unknown, however we have a contingent of folks interested and invested in the the Eternal Kingdoms and the economy. As a guild that supported JTodd and Crowfall from the kickstarter, we have significant assets available from Citadels to Palaces to Parcels and will be monitoring the development of these systems as JTodd's vision for this mechanic expands. Join us in Discord or PM Angelmar. Some video from the Campaigns: FIRST SIEGE OF TRIAL OF THE GODS First Sieges of Trial of Zaleena FORTAL KOMBAT 15 Balance v 33 Chaos Infected Sieges 7 Winterblades v. 12 Sugoi 9 Winterblades v 14 Avari/LoD 8 -W- v 17 Sugoi Ride of the Legionaires; Eurocrusade! Playlist

This in part is a communication problem. It took the community years of complaining to get 6 man grps back (after ACE had them in for 6mos from a bug). Dropping the healing requirement from 40% of your player base to 33% is a big improvement. The community is justifiably dismayed and concerned that 8 days prior to launch, ACE is propping TEST Dregs CWs with 5 man groups, thus apparently reverting the change. It makes a person wonder if ACE really comprehends and understands how 5 vs 6 man grps play out in practice in their combat model. Whether its a knob or not is nice to know--its also not the issue. What the community really wants to know is if ACE actually comprehends that this is a big deal and will commit to having 6 man groups in any (and all) campaigns at launch.

Winterblades making a guest appearance with HAX and YBR to prevent the Lord of Death (and allies UDL/SIN/MWH/DAD/TB) from taking a CW victory. And some more roaming PvP fun w/ Rufio!

Winterblades recruitment is re-opening again with the new launch! See you all for live July 6. www.winterblades.net

If this was at or post-launch, the no-import CWs that last a month+ have a lot of attraction. No Import resetting every 2-3 months would probably be my preferred ruleset. In beta with recurrent wipes and lots of 4-7 day long CWs (with the occasional 2-3 week one) it's much harder to convince folks to get excited to start over from scratch again for the Nth time and then do it all again next week... Goes to the inherent difficulty of running a game as a "live service" while still building it.

We've had the discussion on crafting multiple times, see above. It's Important to note that Blazzen is posting hvy weapons, except for the book which is non hvy and can be used as a comparison point to wartribe. As to the stats making the delta from wartribe to leg be greater, they are more difficult to quantify and matter more class to class. Certainly a champ who gets almost all their kill potential and damage from neckbreaker (with assist from rend and massive cleave) and has an auto-crit mechanic benefits greatly from stacking crit damage. For an endgame harvester, given a decent loop of R10 small nodes can farm ~100 leg ore per hour (enough for 2x 1hands or 1x2hand weapon), and enough purple to kit our a set of armor. Even if things aren't ideal, that harvester has kitted his PvP main in 2hrs of work for the next month of siege logging. Meanwhile, because all progression was removed from gearing/item quality rarity and shoehorned into belts, noobs are stuck behind the belt grind gate using intermediate picks to get 5 white ore per node that can't even be turned into something better than wartribe.

I read your post and replied in detail with evidence from Crowfall. Picking up on the example you provide of 40% gear being buffed to 200% of baseline (that apparently you didnt actually mean as an example, per your reply) lets take a look at a wartribe drop in CF: 95 DMG. A Legendary non-heavy is 108-110. An approximately 15% difference between non-crafted wartribe and legendary. What we have in game is lower than even your joking/random/off-the-cuff(?) example of a low end of 40%. Alot, you challenge me to define what the percentage should be. I do not know. I do not profess to be a game designer. In general players are very good at finding problems in a games design, they are terrible at solutions (see e.g. the AoE buffs resulting in AoE spam metas that the community clamored for years). I can say that I'm going to put very casual effort into chasing that 15% spread. I guess the benefit of easy come is that is all it takes. **Note: Hvy weapons will cap out at ~130 and SHOULD have a penalty associated with them via weapon weight--currently champs can ignore the penalty as ult recharge isnt modified by weapon weight. ----- Turning to what is apparently the core of your support for easy come, easy go, your concern for CF's population growth, the NPE and experience of new players, we likely actually agree on many things. However, the solution/problem is not easy come, easy go, it is ACE having to have an axis of progression to retain players. Blair's solution to this problem is rather inelegant and consists of just placing impactful stat boosts behind the belt grind gates. In a MOBA you take the casual PvP and do not care about progression, every match resets and everyone starts all over. MMORPGs require progression to keep players subscribed. Before ACE planned to have passive training keep players around for ~4-6 months for end game crafting to kick in and years for all the pvp buffs to accrue. Now you can finish characters in hours and race through the guild infrastructure grind in two-three weeks--how is ACE going to keep people subscribed? Blair created the belt grind to give people an axis of progression they could work on to keep them in game and playing farming gold and materials and locking impactful crafting and harvesting stats behind the belts. Myself and many others have commented on how terrible it feels as a noob to break rocks and get a couple of white doobers (and that your harvesting is irrelevant until blue/purple/leg anyway--see wartribes). ACE has to have some axis of progression for players to chase. In Shadowbane that is building up a City (months). In EVE its your passive training + ISK bank (forever). What is the axis of progression in CF? Leveling your character? couple of hours. Gearing your character? A weekend once you get the infrastructure in place. Before, crafting and gear was impactful and players took a month to get really max geared (most ppl stayed in blue armor/purple weapons because it was a real grind to get to Leg). That axis of progression is largely gone now. ACE had to create some axis of progression to replace what they removed so we got the belts forcing noobs to use basics and intermediates to learn to harvest with--and it feels terrible. There has to be some axis of progression to give players a reason to be in game. ---- As to failing to complete the core game systems, thats in part true, but really its more a failure to have an overarching coherent plan for Crowfall. Without even talking about the how of PVP in EVE, you can map out all the incentives that drive PVP in their economic model. EVE is in many ways an economic model with asset destruction tacked on to create a sink and keep the engine cycling. Crowfall has never had a published vision for an economic/incentive model that actually flowed on paper. This was pointed out even back in kick starter--okay so we get imports/exports if we win... to what end? RenLoTD did a great series of posts on the problem and outlined potential solutions via adding an EK Siege Ladder system. Now why are you winning? to get exports to build up and EK, to compete on a siege ladder etc. Crowfall's economic model/incentive structure has always felt extremely ad hoc.