McTan

I am glad Vanguard is planning to come back at beta and I hope they do. I never burn myself out on testing, though I have guild-mates who have done just that with several games. If I have learned anything about the current state of MMOs, it is that current-day releases are like yesterday's betas, current betas are like yesterday's alphas, and so on. This is why a lot of games flop so hard, they are putting out half-baked things because there is neither money nor patience nor time to cook these games fully. I hope they take a lot of your suggestions seriously. As for the direction of the game, I am more confident in its success than I was during Big World (last time I had played), but I suspect that taking multiple extended breaks has enabled my seeing progress where you might see stalling or regression. I would never have consistently tested this game for 3.5 years, so it's possible we just have significantly different tastes. Either way, take it easy, hope to see you later.

I go back and forth on this one. I tend to fall on the less information side, though, because I'd rather guilds have to try to gather intel on each other rather than use the scoreboard. I view it like any secretive aspect of a game, where you try to bluff or obscure your strategy from your opponents. There are so, so few opportunities to do this type of thing in an MMO, and I'm loathe to be rid of it. It does not feel good to learn you did too much, but I'm not sure that bad feeling is worth allowing guilds to know they had perfect efficiency.

You literally brought out KDA screenshots to try to demean the person debating you. If that was a worthy tactic then nobody would ever listen to me, the dwarf who died a thousand deaths. You have reasonable points about the balance between PvE and PvP activity. But your insistence is causing you to exaggerate the imbalance, IMO. Again, Crowfall needs PvE activities to have high value so that PvP activities can harness some of that value, too. In a similar way, primary PvP (sieges) require PvE preparation, and so those PvE activities gain value because the sieges have high value. It's more symbiotic.

Asymmetric PvP is the point I'll hammer on for this genre. Keep it in mind when you think about the game and the role of PvE in generating PvP, and things may clarify. My favorite aspect of the Divine Favor system is that it gives guild-level sub-goals. I sign-on, and depending on who is on and how many, I join or start a group to try to make progress on a sub-goal. I do those things in the world, and am therefore subjected to potential PvP. I am always skeptical when I read pro-PvP perspectives that give no harbor to the idea PvE (aka indirect PvP) goals sustain different PvP opportunities than PvP goals. This game is not a lobby PvP game. You don't get to schedule your killing for dinner and have that be the end-all. I am not criticizing the desire for that, but there are other genres for it (MOBAs, shooters, arena MMOs). Sometimes I think the criticism is coming from a misunderstanding because so many like games partition their PvE and PvP. WoW is the primary example of this kind of thing. PvP fans can get immediate fun from WoW arenas. It's controlled, predictable, you literally sign-up for it. Crowfall is of a different ilk. You very rarely sign-up for PvP. It comes to you at different times during the game. Sometimes you are alone and get rolled, sometimes you roll a loner. Sometimes you get an even numbers fight, and sometimes you get a four-way fight. Sometimes you run around and there is nobody to fight, so you need other things to do (Divine Favor helps immensely) other times you really want to do some Divine Favor things or build your keep and you just keep getting rolled. Asymmetric PvP is harder to support in a game because some players find the stretches of no PvP to be too boring and other players find the omnipresent threat of PvP too daunting.

I'd like to see them lean into this and make the WT clusters spawn thralls at night, instead of just plopping a bunch of small random spawns uniformly.

Yeah, they should make a discipline named Commander.

They could lower the level requirement to join dregs, plenty of mobs there. And once they (hopefully) align risk and reward with WT drops and fix chiefs and kings, it'll help make WTs in Dregs a nice part of the ecosystem.

I'll speak for myself, since I do this a lot. It's simple, really, I've had enough experiences with game designers who do not understand what is fun or not about the games they design. Perhaps it is a forest but for the trees situation. But a good idea is sometimes worth restating, even if it's simply confirmation. I need only look at some Crowfall mistakes with some of the best ideas in Shadowbane to realize that restating Shadowbane's successes is a worthy thing to do here. And that's not to mention the things they just have not ported over at all.

The other part of the scarcity question is one that ACE by-and-large continues to miss out on, which is geographical scarcity in the world. The other way to combat numbers advantages is to force them to spread out. This is why I used the victory vectors concepts to advocate for the per member Divine Favor. A group of 20 might run around all together, but that is a self-inflicted geographical constraint. When the reward for spreading out is too low (like 2 groups of 10 or 4 groups of 5), then you get big ol' masses of people. At least, you want something lost if groups are unwilling to risk choosing to lower their coherent numbers (meaning the true numbers in an encounter, not the fact that 20 minutes later they might have more numbers running together). The most important insights into the game, right now, is when you find a small group from a big guild. What are they accomplishing and how can more of those vectors be introduced? ACE should pay heavy attention to these patterns, if they are not. I would, for example, greatly extend the day-night cycle, to bring discipline hunting more into play. Right now it looks like a bunch of non-intersecting hunts from everyone. I never run into people, bc why would they be where I am when they could just be somewhere else? I would not only extend the day-night, but also only spawn the majors at hunger shards that are located within wartribe camps. People should have an understanding of where to go to hunt disciplines. I would further keep tamping down on what can be accomplished in low-risk areas (GR and Infected). That purples could come from Infected, and Blues could come from GR is a travesty because it makes all the Wartribes in Dregs irrelevant. I should again note that I entirely plan to do no import, long duration dregs precisely because it alleviates this problem, whatever the early headaches of arming my guild might be. Yeah we'll be in crap and have to farm Wartribes, but it will also provide competitive reasons to go to Wartribes, where none currently exist. I have never seen an opponent at a Wartribe this dregs. Another idea is to put only certain types of pack pigs in certain zones, so that a guild cannot lock down a whole zone and get everything they need. Regional scarcity. There was a twitter post by JTC in like 2018 asking for ideas about player-run economies and a wrote a solid post about economic and geographic scarcity, which got essentially universal support from players, but which is nearly completely disconnected from the game as it is. Uniform resource distribution is crushing. Make bigger guilds who have bigger needs spread out with regional scarcity.

The necessary response to this whole discussion is scarcity. When winning comes with a fixed value (that is a fixed amount of exports), then there is downward pressure on size. The same can be said for the per member Divine Favor points. We are seeing that downward pressure play out right now, though not with complete fidelity since it is short duration with lower than wanted population density. @APE Dis played great in that fight. The "window" mechanic has always been a great opportunity for smaller sized groups to outmaneuver larger groups due to coordination issues, so I am hopeful to hear that we may get a few more window mechanics to fight over. I should also say I wish that keeps and mini-keeps take on a different mechanism (handshake). There are already alliances, and they ebb and flow politically and it's great. I anticipate the nation/subguild/alliance formal mechanic will still allow for organic informal alliances. It certainly did in Shadowbane. There will always be willing cooperation between players. Some are formal mechanics (group, guild, alliance). Others are informally organized and overlaid on the game. The only true counterpoint is to have scarce things to compete over, and Crowfall has that. The longer duration, no import campaign worlds will be the most dynamic when it comes to alliance building and crumbling. Look forward to it!

Really? Seems they keep going in really peculiar directions with solutions to self-made problems. The problem isn't selling disciplines to allow builds, it's selling white disciplines. SolutIon: make basic bodies poor/grey quality, sell poor/grey quality disciplines for gold. Allow for R1-10 graves, allow for white body part harvesting (and green), allow for white body crafting, put in white/green quality discipline droppers, let ambrosia scale with quality of minerals, play normal RNG outcomes with mismatch between ambrosia and body part quality. I am excited for this game, but behind the good ideas are a lot of really weird implementations. It's the band-aid on band-aid problem all over the place, and the more patches the more it starts to feel like band-aids all the way down.

Cleric Radical Searing Light is broken. Should be Holy damage, but registers in Combat Log as Fire damage (and, as far as I can tell, actually is acting like fire damage, subject to target fire damage resistance)

Congrats, man! Quite the grind.

Just got booted from Duchy of Marconia. Now, logging in puts me at a queue of 5 people, never goes down. Logged in and out fully, still there. Edit: Dern informed me that it likely meant zone down. Now, I am back in.

The politics in this game are going to be hilarious. Fun write-up Edit: I really hope they let us name our keeps in the future. Though, could we really come up with something better than "Drakenoire"?