Capture Points - Official discussion thread

[Kendogg 50]

Wipe or no wipe: well I prefer no wipe because I've been skilling from day one, though I understand those who haven't will of course vote to wipe.  Ultimately, I would prefer to have a wipe and after the reset, instead of giving us a X multiplier on experience, is to implement a skill tome that works on any tree, and give us some of those to jump start things for testing.  But of course that requires development time.  The other option is to give us all full builds or a buff that encompasses all the skills and remove that maintenance from everyone for right now since you are still tweaking them anyway and you want us to focus more on the talents that are in more need of testing.

Suggestions for campaign balancing:  I like the idea of increased bounties for long held keeps and whatnot.  Another nob, which also helps the low population in a huge world issue, would be to add events that bring people together more and provide another way to earn campaign points.  An event can be very simple such as a neutral zone boss spawning and announced to everyone in the zone (but not it's location, so if it is not a static mob but a free roaming one you still have to find it).  Bosses can vary in strength to support different group sizes.   Another event idea would be similar to the keep bounty system, in having a group of NPCs spawn to bring tribute to a long held keep, but begin their trip in contested territory.  The quicker on the draw you are, the further away it is from enemy territory.  Or the other way around, NPCs flee from a long held keep towards the opposition.  These events can be strategically planted to give the side with very little territory the benefit of not having to go deep in enemy territory to grab it, which would just be free points for the winning side.  Instead, it forces more fights in the losing sides or contested or neutral territory.  Can also make territory closer to the beachheads harder to hold for the opposition (handicap on the cap time, strength of NPC guards).  This works better for campaigns with fixed teams than guild vs guild, though.  One final benefit of events in general is that those who are solo might also have a better idea of what zones will be less populated based on current events, if they want to try and avoid a fight.  this could be indicated on the map or perhaps a chat command to display the last X events or a persistent log in its own tab.

 

[yianni 649]

wipe everything, make skills accumulate faster. there will be a lot of new people coming in. 

without performance being fixed, especially FPS issues this wont go well

[Jah 6,996]

9 minutes ago, yianni said:

wipe everything, make skills accumulate faster. there will be a lot of new people coming in. 

without performance being fixed, especially FPS issues this wont go well

How often should they wipe everything to make things more fair for new players?

[yianni 649]

1 minute ago, Jah said:

How often should they wipe everything to make things more fair for new players?

i understand, its still pre alpha though. id much rather have my skills wiped then have new people come and get rolled and they quit because they cant compete

[Jah 6,996]

Just now, yianni said:

i understand, its still pre alpha though. id much rather have my skills wiped then have new people come and get rolled and they quit because they cant compete

When will that issue go away?

[Nerd 21]

To me, what matters from this event is getting test results and getting people excited about the game.

If you expect player numbers to be about the same I don't see why not to just continue as is, it would more accurately show the results of a "mid game" campaign and players would appreciate not having to grind up again. The only concern I have would be the unrealistic stockpiling of items which could be remedied by having a low import limit of around 20-30. IMO the current level of 150 imports would damage the ingame server economy, promote farming on the "opposite" campaign server, result in players burning out BEFORE the campaign even starts, and ultimately the test results would be skewed.

If you believe there is going to be a spike of new players, you'll have to do a full wipe to keep things fair. It would be a poor idea to have a "first campaign" with players, 15 minutes after the servers open, on epic mounts running around in blue vessels and gear with a month's worth of combat training indiscriminately slaying every level 3 vendor geared noob in sight, who then proceed to ragequit, tell all of their friends that the game is full of nolifes, and opt for a refund. Although many on the forums would have lots of fun, it would be a disaster and hurt the game.

To some extent it is unfair to advertise a "first campaign" but give people access beforehand to build their characters and there are bound to be complaints but majority rules!

[yianni 649]

Just now, Jah said:

When will that issue go away?

when they decide that no more wipes are needed

[Jah 6,996]

Just now, yianni said:

when they decide that no more wipes are needed

We aren't talking about a wipe that is needed for development purposes. If the devs feel the need for a wipe, that is totally fine. What is being debated here is whether a wipe for fairness is desirable. And if it is, when won't it be?

[yianni 649]

Just now, Jah said:

We aren't talking about a wipe that is needed for development purposes. If the devs feel the need for a wipe, that is totally fine. What is being debated here is whether a wipe for fairness is desirable. And if it is, when won't it be?

i honestly dont care either way tbh. i just want character and SB wipes

[ren 1,355]

Since this is the first "sanctioned" campaign with goodies for the winner, it strikes me as the right time for a full wipe.  Dial up the training to whatever makes sense to get us through the trees before the next major milestone.  I expect many new and returning testers to be showing up and having everyone starting on equal footing would have good optics.

[ren 1,355]

12 minutes ago, Jah said:

We aren't talking about a wipe that is needed for development purposes. If the devs feel the need for a wipe, that is totally fine. What is being debated here is whether a wipe for fairness is desirable. And if it is, when won't it be?

We have already been told "soft launch" is the threshold for no more wiping.  We aren't there yet.

[Jah 6,996]

Just now, ren said:

We have already been told "soft launch" is the threshold for no more wiping.  We aren't there yet.

That isn't what I am talking about. I am well aware of the longstanding plan to wipe before soft launch and never again after.

What I am talking about is how commonly people ask for wipes in the name of fairness. That is something that has happened for every major patch of Crowfall, and will continue to happen after this "first sanctioned campaign." Either there is something wrong with the system, or people just need to accept that the system does give an advantage to veterans over beginners-- by design.

[BleakSymphony 9]

18 minutes ago, Jah said:

That isn't what I am talking about. I am well aware of the longstanding plan to wipe before soft launch and never again after.

What I am talking about is how commonly people ask for wipes in the name of fairness. That is something that has happened for every major patch of Crowfall, and will continue to happen after this "first sanctioned campaign." Either there is something wrong with the system, or people just need to accept that the system does give an advantage to veterans over beginners-- by design.

I definitely see where you're coming from here, Jah. Though they have talked about tome systems or other methods of catch-up, the design of the system is as you describe. 

 

In my opinion, they should wipe everything minus passive skill trees. Wipe spirit bank, vessels, etc, but leave the passive skill trees and, at the very least, see if the gap that will form between the vets and the newcomers is something they are happy with and feel is a good fit for their vision of the game after launch. If they decide it isn't fair/what they want, they can change it, but so long as they keep wiping it during testing, they aren't truly "testing" it, are they?  

[Arnminster 31]

My preference would be no imports, start at level 0. Will you be keeping the current shortcuts? i.e. easy to create disciplines? 

As for skills I'm on the fence for that. Based on how the game is currently built skills will never be reset once the game goes live. Each campaign your account will have more skill points allocated. So resetting will only mimic the actual soft launch.

[yianni 649]

PS nerf frames before the sanctified campaign and character wipes 

[coolster50 2,250]

3 hours ago, mandalore said:

If you’re doing no imports why not wipe vessels?  Letting the guilds that know how to/and have crafted vessels bring them still screws over the have nots.  If you’re going wipe banks wipe vessels to.  

 Cuz I don’t want to lose my crafted vessel just yet

[Nerd 21]

The seasonal changes to point accumulation make total sense. I like this change.

I'm not sure what to think about the capture bonus system though. To some extent it does provide specific targets to fight for however it promotes backcapping to get the points multiplier rather than fighting. The points system has to be built so that it generates fights for it to effectively moderate the PvP aspect of the game.

I'd like to see these changes in action! I could be wrong!

I have talked about the points system being more reflective of current player activity in previous posts, you might be able to use the capture bonuses and multiplier mechanisms to do this. For example wiping a hostile group in a fort while taking it could fill up the bonus pool. Another example would be, after a certain amount of kills or gathering activity around an objective, it could be "leveled up" for an increased point multiplier which would be reset if the objective is flipped. Perhaps you could give attackers more bonus points for flipping these leveled up objectives. Maybe an objective needs a little bit of love before it gives you the full point count. Lots of possibilities, it doesn't have to be super grindy either.

[Soulreaver 1,778]

Make camps connect to forts, meaning in order to take a fort u need to fill in the missing camps from your beachhead and onwards.

https://community.crowfall.com/topic/23373-improvement-to-the-campcapture-system/

[Soulreaver 1,778]

Also : 

When ever a GUARD is attack set off a warning (attacked by a PLAYER that is ofc)

As is when a fort/camp/keep is attacked we're notified when the capturing starts to take place, but that isn't really enough time for us to get from A to B to defend that place. 

[DocHollidaze 821]

Realistically, though, the whole wiping thing to protect the new players from quitting does not accomplish that at all.

Veteran players naturally form up into organized guilds, and those guilds accumulate gear and train their vessels at a right much faster than new solo players.

This whole preoccupation with wiping is supposedly to keep new players from getting trashed, but it will do nothing of the sort, and further, it will exacerbate their feelings of inadequacy because they might perceive they were trashed while on even footing.

At least if they got trashed by veteran players with good vessels they can save their ego by blaming it on that.

You would probably do more to keep noobs from quitting by banning the assassin class or some specific Twitch streamers. I joke, but am half serious.