McTan

This patch is in trouble, lots of server problems, stealth 1-shot mobs, very stuttery, big zone crashes.

GG, I'm glad the chaos orb spam through walls meta is dying. May it be replaced by something more interesting!

Ace needs to take a deep breath, and understand their player economy base. It has one primary strength and one primary weakness that need to be well understood. The strength is that gear decays fairly quickly, so there will be consistent demand for dust. The weakness is that there are no long term guild gold sinks. Eventually all current gold sinks finish. What we need is per-dregs internal gold economy, so that camps are active, desirable places. The only reasonable solution to this is increasing gold maintenance costs for your holdings. Castles (and buildings and ranks within), keeps (and buildings and ranks within), forts (and ranks and guard ranks within), outposts. Impose maintenance costs that scale with amount of holdings, and allow gold to have consistent, repeating demand in every dregs. As for this misunderstanding of the way they setup the rewards, it's rough. But take your medicine, the players figured out a good way to do something, and that's too bad for ACE. Doing this punitive shift at the last minute is not acceptable for competitive games. My point being, it doesn't even matter in the long run, because all the rewards from the dregs aren't the long run solution to the economy. They are relative zeroes in the long run. The problem currently being that there is no long run demand.

Being able to easily hop servers is a big detriment to the game. It shouldn't surprise the devs that, in a competitive environment, people seek out the path of least resistance. When you offer us duplicates and lesser populated servers, you get a further dispersal of people. The FIVE shadows will bear this out. I predict within three days of the shadows starting, we will be knee-deep in complaints about nobody to fight. Every server will have its dominant faction, and the other two factions will simply equalize on a different server and be the dominant faction there. No incentive to stay around and get beat, when you could just use six key strokes and be in a safe area and win. It was foolish not to assign home server, server clusters, and foolish to allow unlocking of characters to be so casual.

They could just do proportional point allocation, relative to time held. This would encourage a bit more "battlefront" situation. Not all things would need to be this, but it could be useful to consistently have a spot on each map to go where you can actively gain moment-to-moment. A "hotzone" outpost, or something akin.

This claim about guild and alliance caps having no effect on zerging is just so flimsy, it's bonkers. Unless people want to fully claim that (1) friendly fire and (2) shared keeps, have no influence on the politics, tactics, and strategy in this game, I just cannot abide the claim that guild and alliance caps have no influence. It's completely nonsense and just obviously wrong. Sorry Pope, we meet again. You, yourself, in the quote above say that it changes the number of directions you will be attacked from, with a sense of dismissal that I have to tactically question at the most basic level. When your NAP ally hits your melee with their chaos orbs, we'll all see how inconsequential lower caps are to this game. It's like saying a 1v1 alliance v alliance is the same as a 3v5 guild v guild. It's just fundamentally different, and we literally literally literally saw this on the battlefield. Here's the difference: a 2v2 guild v guild which has since become a 1v1 alliance v alliance. Huge difference tactically. Being the same alliance lowers the difficulty of combat at scale.

They should play with rulesets. I'd love a ruleset where I can try it out, though, even if some people from the largest guilds aren't in for it. No problem, we can have different preferences. They also need to continue to figure out how to create pressure for larger guilds and alliances to need to fight on many fronts at once. For example, forts could have associated outposts (think hexagonal outposts + central fort), each of which create resources. More hotzones active at the same time. Benefits for holding, actively multiple positions that are not in sprinting distance of each other. Many more camps. And, most important, a cost to size. Large guilds need to pay for being large. We need a per member cost in guild, for a guild sink. We need friendly fire outside groups. We need scaling cost per holdings, in the form of maintenance cost per rank, per building. Simple and effective. Without keep/fort/outpost maintenance costs, the economy is about to crumble to bits. We need self-contained dregs gold-sinks at the guild & holding level.

If you quarter the point accumulation time on outposts you essentially 4x their point output. So just 4x forts and keeps, and it's all equivalent to now.

One approach they might adopt is to have neighboring zones hold important POIs when it comes to keep and castle sieges. As in, there is some kind of banetree/ward mechanic in each zone that is adjacent, each one of which matters whether it is won/lost (like a percent of damage or something). It's time to think outside the box because this problem is self-limiting. The more Crowfall grows, the more this is a problem, which causes people to quit, etc.

This has happened, does happen, and will happen. Nevertheless, not having the infrastructure advantage of shared keeps & no friendly fire is of significant consequence. It is why the pre-alliances dregs was the most fun and interesting dregs.

Vessels should be locked, yes. They have the tech, and for some reason at the 11th hour completely bailed on export limits. The current system of server hopping essentially allows players keystrokes to create more harvestables and faster mob spawns. It'll be obvious when the next NA dregs, where there is only one, is much more fun and active. What should be considered is making EKs portable. Let us attach our EK to a dregs, and port back and forth in the same way that God's Reach/EKs work now. This would alleviate some of the frustration that we all feel around guild inventory management in dregs.

Many more zones + low guild caps. At the very least, ACE should twist some of these famous knobs we've heard so much about. And make a dregs with 10 person groups, friendly fire, tons of zones, 50 person guilds, and no alliances. Just, you know, to see if the claims that some make that "nothing would change!11!!11, big guilds would still be allied!!111!!" hold up (hint: they don't. the best dregs, by FAR, was pre-alliances - time to go back). Give us an actual alternative ruleset dregs. Take every knob and twist it the other way, to let it be a wild west of small guilds.

Couldn't agree more. That's why stealth ults are broken. It is the ultimate in "just leave and don't fight it." Edit: in general, I understand what you are saying and am just being slightly facetious. I do think perma stealth is not fun in PvP games, but it's not worth rehashing. As is, 750 SP is a good start at rebalancing.

It is certainly the case that uncapping aoes has other consequences, particularly for melee. That’s why I’d like to see it combined with that suite of changes, like bigger groups, friendly fire, smaller guilds, and even some more unusually suggestions like: baked in pdm for melee tray, etc. But let it still be said that aoes do have caps naturally baked in, because any given radius has a natural cap in a game that does not allow character stacking. With that in mind, they have more interesting options than hard caps, imo. Tighten the radius or ray or whatever the case might be. Let the aoe damage lessen in outward concentric circles, or on rectangles the farther away, or let aoe circles strengthen in damage as they continue. in other words, there is a whole stadium-full of cool options that are eliminated by the simplistic nature of hard caps

One of the things that happened in Crowfall development is that, without an NDA, people started treating it like a completed game sooner. It was hard not to. So, we got a lot of power tuning and balance tuning, and worry about the relative strength of wartribe vs crafting, etc. Some of the decisions were right, IMO, like the race/class split, and introducing forts. Another big shortcoming is that we never truly got a balance pass aimed at inviting smaller groups to carve out a more permanent station in the world. The pyramid of outposts, forts, minikeeps, keeps, castle seems like it makes sense...except there was never a pass at making holding more cost more over time. There is no downside. So, as much as the thronewar aspect "conquer" seems to make it into the game, the thronewar aspect "maintain" really didn't. It is next to impossible to win a siege without vastly outnumbering or out politicking someone (zone cap issues aside). But, it is in the best interest of the biggest guilds to crush the smaller guilds, rather than coexist peacefully, with NAPs and politicking. This is because it is cheaper for big guilds to just eliminate and takeover what the smaller guilds have done (or simply keep them from doing anything). They failed spectacularly to really understand and map the reason why the Shadowbane worlds were so, so vibrant. They were vibrant because the smallest groups of organized people could establish an important city and a corner of the world. Here, that is impossible. tl;dr let small guilds own and rank property by introducing many, many, many more slots for owned and maintained property (not circle caps). making ownership consistently cost something and scale it by number owned. Another big swing and miss, so far, is the really intriguing pieces of the game (ending worlds, guild ranks, rewards, exports/imports, and divine favor) just never got enough testing and innovation. We saw the first divine favor and dregs over one year ago, and almost nothing changed at all. We never got more cards per season, or dailies, or hourlies, or individual guild hidden cards, or a more complex competition over points, or anything. I'm really not sure why. As an outsider, this seems like the most fun little sandbox open to them, and they have so far refused to play in it.