Best posts made by Gothix

@Roccandil I belive Syndesia should be about ruling guilds setting rules for their own zones.

If "good guild" rules a city then this zone (city ZOI - zone of influence) can be adjusted by their wishes... guards instructed to attack evil aligned players on sight, NPCs refusing trading evil players, friendly fire set to OFF, and so on...

If "evil guild" rules a city, then they can adjust rules how they see fit in their own city ZOI... guards instructed to attack good aligned players, NPC not offering services to good players, friendly fire ON if they wish, and so on...

THAT is what would make sieges a lot more attractive and meaningful. An ability to really influence life in various zones.

@Roccandil said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:

My takeaway here is that you want to kill allies, but not be called names for doing it. "I killed an ally in an alley, and he called me a NAME! Meanie!"

Sounds like the definition of "crybully".

Trust me I never cry about anything. Even if I have certain group of players following me around to continually target me. I simply adjust to circumstances, I play within good guild where we help each other so I will have allies in such times, and so on.

I also want to be able to use PvP action wherever it is allowed (regardless if it's an enemy or a member of alliance that i feel deserves such my action,... no one can call me a griefer for killing a target within a city and taking his "stuff" (if I can) because that city was an area where PvP action is available.

Griefing is continually harassing a same certain player, deliberately targeting only him personally.

@Roccandil said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:

So, you're ok with some harassment?

Making an occasional single kill is not harassment. I bet now you will say, but yeah it is if that other player doesn't like it and this is where you are wrong.

This is game where PvP actions are allowed in certain world and areas. If hostile action within a city is possible and allowed by game mechanics, then killing any player within city walls is not harassment, it's simply game feature, and players should be aware and watch themselves within this city.

Certain players may be too sensitive and not wish be killed anywhere, but this is why they have a planet with huge zone where PvP isn't even possible at all. If they come to world where hostile actions are available, then they should not complain if they die anywhere, in any circumstance that is mechanically available.

Killing players is an intended feature of this game, stealing their stuff is as well. If anyone considers this a griefing and is too aggrevated by death happening to him, then honestly traveling PvP enable worlds isn't something that fits him. He can either play on safe space, or play something else. What he can't do is ask for changes that would make more worlds safe for him, because this is disrespecting all other players out there.

Also, calling any person out there derrogative terms (regardless of how they play) is also not OK. They are people playing a game. Using insults is always a poor taste and toxic, regardless how right you think you are.

@Roccandil said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:

I also consider griefing to be exploiting game mechanics in order to...

Exploiting should be bannable if illegal methods are used to do anything non intended by the game, regardless if it is to kill people or to dupe items or whatever. I'm not talking about exploits, hacks or similar. Obviously those are instant bans in my view.

But if game allows you to kill a person in certain spot (standing in market place for example and using shopping UI), then that is not exploit, and that is also not griefing. It's a legit kill.

If alliance members aren't immune to friendly fire, then you should simply watch where you are shooting your AoEs at, specially if alliance member is low on HP. That's part of the tactics and awareness skills. If some alliance member is trying to deliberately go into your shooting zone (for whatever reason), then use diplomatic channels to request allied guild kick him for punishment, or break alliance with that guild if that other guild doesn't care about it's members behavior.

It's called social mechanics.

Game should not hand hold people and give them safety net against "bad things" happening to them (death, karma loss, whatever). People should be aware of their surroundings and act accordingly. If you do not care about being aware of where you are and where you are shooting, then deal with the consequences of hitting people with your AoE.

If some player deliberately tries to stand where you are shooting at then use other social means at your disposal to deal with him. For example, warn other people around about him and have ruling guilds order all guards to attack him on sight, and forbid NPCs to trade him etc.

That said, there should be personal options for ruling guilds to make list of specific people that guards should consider targets (regardless of those players alignment or guild affiliation). Same for NPC interactions. So this players can be punished for their actions, same as if they were going around and killing people.

Outright disabling all friendly fire is definitely not a solution. That would be like completely disabling all in game chat for everyone because some players are going around insulting people...

@Alexian said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:

Enabled friendly fire and collision mechanics will force all guilds, armies, battalions, zergs, etc. of varying size that they need to be tactical about how, when, and where they deploy their assets. It will require them to carefully consider the terrain in ways that disabled friendly fire doesn't; they'd need to be careful not to let themselves be drawn into situations where their numbers are a hindrance. It's realistic, it demands greater tactics, and it might minimize the extent to which zergs can just blindly steamroll the opposition!

Exactly. And if there is some alliance player deliberately going into your line of fire constantly, then use social mechanics to punish his behavior. Get him kicked out of alliance, have your town guards place him on "attack on sight list", have NPCs in your towns refuse to trade him. Have other people around you remember him and punish him by full extend of social methods.

@Roccandil said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:

But it -is- a solution. It's simply not one you like.

By that logic, "not releasing a game at all" is also solution xD just not the one you like. (It most certainly prevents all abuse of everything, globally.)

So let me rephrase that for your convenience. That is not a - good - solution.

@Jetah guild immunity can be a thing if guilds have limited membership numbers (lets say 200-300, that's enough for decent guild). In that way you would not have thousand players zergs happening. Or if instead of member limit you have soft cap on member limit by imposing large upkeep costs on large guilds.

We NEED to have as many different guilds as possible, not only for combat aspects and sieges, but for politics, and everything else. Guild member limit is one way I see to make people not go the path of the least effort and all join one huge guild. The other way is to make large guilds have large running costs. I wrote about that in one of the other threads.

The reason I'd prefer guild based immunity, is in case you run into small skirmish happening, 2 vs 3 vs 2 vs 4... and 2 of those are your guild members...

With guild immunity on, you can jump in and help them instantly without having to yell for them to invite you in their party first. It makes an experience much smoother.

And member limitation (or soft cap mechanics) will still prevent large zergs happening, because there will be no guilds with huge member numbers out there.

@Roccandil the reason why FF must exist is because if it does not then it either:

1. gives a huge advantage to good alignment vs evil alignment
2. severely restricts evil alignment playstyle

Players can either be in PvP mode or out of PvP mode. Now, if you don't activate PvP mode, you can't attack anyone, so we can disregard that mode for time being.

Being in PvP mode, you can attack people (you also need to be in this mode to defend yourself, because you need PvP enabled to damage your attacker).

So now there is bunch of people fighting, and all people are in PvP mode, there is a mix of good and evil aligned players from different guilds here (we will exclude neutrals for now for this to remain simple).

Evil aligned people, will want to not only attack good aligned people, but other evil aligned people as well, so if you do not offer them friendly fire you are completely restricting their way of playing, up to the point where it isn't worth playing the game for them.

Not only evil aligned players are in question here, but good part of good aligned guilds, will perhaps want to have a fight (surprise attack) with another good aligned guild that treated them poorly before, in this mayham, so they would like friendly fire enabled as well (this excludes Arboreus of course, I'm talking about Syndesia and Tartaros here).

So If you disable friendly fire existence, you deminish play quality for great majority of evil aligned players, and a good number of good aligned people as well.

You also can't really enable friendly fire for evil aligned people, and turn it off for good aligned people, because (alongside depriving the part of good aligned guilds of play options with this) you would give huge advantage for good aligned people fighting in this mayhem, vs all evil aligned people because they couldn't damage each other, while evils could.

The only way to deal with this is to enable friendly fire for all alignemnts on Syndesia and Tartaros (keep it turned off for Arboreus), and then let people deal with those few "friendlies" (which aren't really friendlies then) that would deliberately stand in their line of fire, by (watching where they are shooting first) and if that's not enough, then using social mechanics. Guild kicks, alliance breaks, refusing to trade with them, and everything else that goes along with it.

This is sandbox, let people deal with people, instead of having mechanics completely diminishing play style options for almost everyone, just to keep few people happy (people that would dislike getting few minus karma points by occasionally hitting same alignment player).

There will surely be quests to get those few points back up when you rarely lose them, plus you can be careful where you are shooting, plus you only get karma points down when you actually kill a person.... your single spell hit will hardly one shot anyone (unless he is already on 1% hp, which will likely get him killed by something else even before he manages to get hit by you).

The situation that you are describing where you would manage to kill someone with aoe, and loose a point or two will happen super rarely, and when it does few points lost doesn't mean anything, and you can get them back later. And you can avoid that if you are somewhat careful in the first place.

For that, it's not worth to exclude friendly fire from game, and completely diminish its features and overall combat quality, just to make occasional player with OCD that doesn't want to lose a single point of karma EVER, happy.

TLDR: (but do read if you care about extra reasoning)

Without friendly fire, intra-alignment skirmishes and fast surprise attacks, just aren't possible, which would bring this (potentially great) sandbox game down up to the point of not being playable for most people that love PvP. And activating friendly fire only for evil alignment (but not for good) would bring a huge disbalance in mass combat.

This is why friendly fire needs to be enabled for everyone on Syndesia and Tartaros, and disabled on Arboreus (to cater to PvE players as well).

By not having friendly fire we can just play a game without PvP then, with just voluntary pre-triggered GvG... because that's how it will really feel like. Like another PvE MMO. (But I guess that's what you would like, it's why you are asking for this.)

@Roccandil you claimed that evil aligned players are at advantage because they have more options, and less restrictions then good aligned people in their play.

I'd strongly disagree with that.

• Lets start with good aligned people being able to effectively play on (and explore) all 3 planets, while evil aligned people can effectively play on only 2 planets (and very restricted on small part of Arboreus, for short time frames).

• Good aligned people can gain knowledge points from all 3 planets, while evil aligned people can't gain knowledge points from most of Arboreus (it's just not possible).

• A large number of good guilds will have their guards auto attack evil players on sight, and NPCs refuse to trade them. Only smaller part of evil aligned guilds will give such order against good players to their guards, because they want to attract good aligned people actually coming to their cities, so players can personally have more PvP. (OK, this is just my educated guess, so you can disregard this point, even though I believe it's pretty solid assumption ).

First 2 points are already a huge deal, and disadvantage evil aligned player play options a lot. If you would additionally add good aligned players immune to FF on Syndesia, that would effectively crush evil alignment a LOT.

I also disagree with your premise that good alignment play style should be rewarded by game mechanics, while evil alignment play style should be "punished".

It's not "wrong" to be a person that likes to play evil aligned character. It's just a different playstyle, and not a "worse" one.

You need both alignments healthy populated, or game will surely fail.

@pushcart said in Haven't pledged? Want to upgrade, but not sure yet? Tell us why!:

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Yeah guilds should have taxes on stuff they own, and larger the guild, larger the taxes, but only from certain number of players upwards.

Example:

guild with 10 players - taxes are 10%
guild with 50 players - taxes are 10% (but its more cash cus more people have more stuff)
guild with 100 players - taxes 10% (but even more cash cus more stuff)

guild with 400 players - taxes are 25% (difficult and costly, but not impossible)
guild with 1000 players - taxes are 75% (unbearable)

These numbers are only just an examples, just show principle how taxes percentage would rise beyond certain number of people in guild. This would set the so called "soft cap" on guild member number.

Number of members where taxes should start to rise in percentage, and how much this percentage would be, is of course point of discussion, and in the end dev choice. But this is one of the ways how to not limit guild member number by hard mechanical limitation, but still add a "soft cap" to discourage guilds rise beyond certain point.

One other way to deter zerging is to tie the rewards to single (winning) guild only, and not shareable in any way.

I will add an example for siege zerging below (overflow guilds), but other methods could be devised to deter zerging in other situations, in some similar way.

For example guild that wins siege does not get gold (or similar rewards that result in directly earning you gold) as reward (gold is simply shared to other guilds that helped with the siege). Siege should be rewarded with something that's bound to character (those characters who were in the guild at the time siege was won*).

In this way, even if 2000 people help, only 200 people that were in the winning guild will only actually be rewarded, and rest 1800 have absolutely nothing from this. Because ALL rewards that winning the siege involve, were bound to those 200 characters somehow.

What kind of rewards that should be is discussable, I can give some examples.

• only those 200 characters get an ability to set their houses in special locations (that are activated and available only to those that were in the guild at the time siege was won*)

• only those 200 characters get special tax free status (every other player auto pays taxes, by game mechanics auto taking extra cash from him, and only those 200 players are ignored by mechanics)

• only those 200 players get special treatmant by NPCs in that zone

• only those 200 players get special options available to them in that zone

• only those 200 players have an ability to get political positions in this zone

Now those are just an examples, but the point is that only the people that were the part of a winning guild at the time the siege was won (both part of the guild at the time siege is won AND and 1 month part of the guild before that), get those rewards, that are tied to their characters.

*I added this one month clause so guilds wouldn't just invite 2000 players right before the siege, and kick them after to avoid taxes.

I would like to suggest another thing (for those areas where friendly fire will be a thing).

If there will be no guild based immunity, I would suggest let guild organisation UI, allow to organize people within a guild into "families".

Allow guilds to have any number of guild members (with optionally including those soft cap mechanics), but limit family size to up to 10 people (size of 2 parties?).

Every player within a guild would be treated mechanically equally in anything connected to guild, and families would just be tied to friendly fire mechanics.

Family members would be immune to each other for friendly fire (regardless of party status), and they wouldn't be immune to friendly fire from rest of guild members.

That would incentivise creating of small tactical teams for organized combat, so guilds that place an effort in being better organized and trained could benefit from this option when group fighting is involved.

@Jetah said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:

i also think the whole isometric view will be a problem for zergs too. Only so many people can fit on a screen, thus only so many can attack an object. then add in friendly fire with no-clip with line of sight projectiles hitting the nearest object, it'll be pretty hard to blob things.

Player collision and friendly fire are indeed the most efficient ways to deter zerging.

@Roccandil we didn't say "eliminate zerging". But they would certainly reduce it. And then in addition of some other mechanics, zerg can become more trouble then what it's worth.

And that is the goal.

I would expect Arboreus cities to depend heavily on politics, and have political mechanics that can impact everything a lot more heavily than Syndesia and Tartaros.

I actually prefer that "funny armors" are never introduced to Fractured.

Perhaps only temporary ones, and tied to specific events. But never permament ones.

The moment i see characters running around with horse head masks and pink pijamas, i'll know end is just behind the corner.

(Just how i personaly feel about "funny costumes")

@Alexian i definitely agree on guilds not being hard capped in member size. And yes this is why logistical cost is so important to implement, and collision and friendly fire would add so much value.

If client had an ability to render that cosmetic part of an outfit only on "client side" so people that don't want to walk into town "full of shiny glowing people with silly masks" aren't forced to see that, than I guess such costumes would be more viable.

Plenty of people want a "decent looking" MMO, where everything is closer to realistic (fantasy based realism), rather than seeing people in pink cat costumes running around. Those people tend to avoid MMOs that introduce such cosmetics and force them to look at it.

An option to "turn on visibility" of cosmetic part of outfit could be a nice feature. So everyone can see what you are wearing from gear, but only those that turned on "costume rendering on other people" can see what cosmetic outfit you are wearing.

Options (Cosmetic Rendering):

• full cosmetic rendering (on everyone)
• render only on player character (only on yourself)
• no rendering (all cosmetic outfits are hidden on everyone)

Those could be core features. An additional options could be (render on guild members, render only on people in friend list,...).

Core mechanics seam really well made. Of course there is a bit of bugs because this is alpha, but mainly this game shows great promise.

Separation to 3 worlds with different rulesets, housing, GvG... Can't wait all this to be tested, but we need to wait for beta for more content to be added.

So far, so good.

@Xzait said in How is everyone liking the game?:

i loved playing the alpha. The only thing that pissed me off was going and grinding wolves for half an hour... then spend like 5-10 mins to cook all the meat... only to have ALL of it disappear from my inventory before i even needed to eat...

Yeah, bugs are part of Alphas.
I grinded for that wolf neck, and crafted it, and when it was crafted I wanted to put it on, right clicked and it.... dissapeared.

But those will get fixed.