I am new to MMO and agree 100% with this post. All it takes is a well organized group of 30 to 50 players to steam roll a server. AGS did not help with the merge as our new server merged world looks like Purple outnumber Yellow and Green combined by an at least 7 to 1 margin. Even though Purple started with one territory on our map they now have 3. Several Yellow and Green players/factions have now switched to Purple and it looks like in less the three days the map will be all purple on on its way to a quick death within one week of the merge. Not sure what AGS was thinking in the merge. Need to balance/limit the number of players in each Alliance and not weight the system based on the number or territories they control. Unless you are in a good active group this game/especially Wars are very boring and mean nothing except the cash they generate for the controlling Faction. This just contributes to the imbalance as the strongest group controlling Terretories just becomes even stronger. Within a week there will be no fun open world PVP on our map. Purple is all I see in every town I run to. Lots of Fun Here (only if your join Purple) and what fun is that. Tried running with a group on day one to try and stop Purple from running up influence. All that did was cost gold and more repair parts than I have been able to farm in three days now. Green was so outnumbered that you would always be killed by 5 to 6 Purple. In the end there were so many Purple they were just killing Green as they spawned at their camps. That is even more fun. So enough about how the game does not work and here are my thoughts as a new MMO player.
Ideas to Balance Servers and make the game more playable/enjoyable for all:
Limit the number of players on each Faction within the Server. i.e. Simply balance the number of each color.
MAKE WARS so it is a just as easy to win as the attacker. You could simply port the OPR model over and use it for WARS. If you want to give the defender a slight advantage give the a catapault or two that are in the field and launch exploding boulders. Now that would be fun.
Have Wars for different Teir Playesrs based on their Gear Score.
Make it less costly when you die. It is no fun farming for three days against PVE enemies to try and replace the number of spare parts you need for repairs. It looks like it is going to take me a week to accumulate enough repair pars for the three hours of fun PVP we had on day one of our server merge.
Have two different types of Servers. One for Competitive Gamers and one for those Casual Gamers who want to play for Fun as Gaming should be Fun and not tedious.
Include an in Game function for VC in Wars and OPR. It would be much easier and enjoyable if you ware able to click on a link in Game to activate a VC with all of the players in that Group/War/OPR.
Allow Companies to control only one territory on the map and limit the number of territories that a Faction can control to 5 territories. That way if there are too many players in one Faction they will need to switch to another Faction if they want to own a Territory.
Make it impossible to declare War on the last Territory that Faction Controls. Every Faction should have a home base.
So for now all I can do is PVE farm on our server and that will get boring pretty quick. Server Merge did nothing to BALANCE SERVER or enhance the Fun of the GAME.
If one company owns multiple cities and all their cities are attacked at the same time, they cannot stagger their wars. So if this is the case then you divide and conquer. Make them defend it all.
Define “weakest”. In most high pop servers a faction can own WW only while the other two own 5 each and still be the strongest because of the revenue WW has. (or EF).
I am not kidding when I say our new server Purple outnumbers green and yellow combined by a 7 to 1 margin. No way to run influence without getting stomped. And even if we pushed enough influence green and yellow are the weakest both in skill and number. The skilled yellow and green swapped to purple when they saw purple zerg the entire map and win their first two wars. Purple owned only one territory to start but now owns three on day two after merge. They had so many running influence, it took them only about 15 to 20 minutes to run to 100% influence and declare wars on all yellow and green territories. Our server will be all purple within the next three to four days. With no numbers and no way to run up influence let alone win an war against purple our server will now be a PVE only game as no yellow or green will even venture out flagged for PVP due the great disparity in numbers.
I see this game dying very shortly. I saw many players leave our first server (from pop around 1200 to 400) prior to the server merge and many that I know are now planning to leave just a week after the merge as the real balancing that needs to be done is in the way servers are balanced. It should be based on the number of players in each faction and not based on the number of territories they control.
I found leveling up to 60 somewhat enjoyable, but getting mauled in a War by a superior number of geared, skilled players is not very fun. Only the best 50 to 100 players on the server may have some fun while the other 1500 to 1600 slowly get bored and leave the game as the Purple dominated map leads to PVE and boredom. This is exactly what happened on the first server I played on. Now the situation is even worse and the players/dominoes as more players will leave the server/game until there is no more.
Wars need to be a fun 50/50 even match and servers need to be balanced with a relatively equal number of players in each faction (so you can run influence).
I think this is the bigger thing. You simply can’t run influence anymore in many zones because of the “new” pvp quests. And this is compounded and ‘snowballed’ as mentioned in other threads - these companies get the money, they have the playerbase, they get the better gear and they have a massive advantage being a defending team (assuming no lag problems).
Their changes have destroyed any hope of even getting to the point where you could declare a war and fight. You have to go to one fixed point, take a fort and get destroyed when 3-5x the players form the opposing faction show up.
The defense against pointing this out is weak and usually revolves around “oh well just do it”. Yeah. I’m in the smallest faction on my server. I join the PVP missions. We put it out in chat a dozen times. We’re trying. We’re failing. People are quitting. These are the simple facts.
Edit: And I will point out this is after the server merge. There is no hope of this getting better because of some fantastical story about how the server merge will revitalize the factions with less of a playerbase.
My suggestion would be to separate hardcore and casual players into different servers entirely. Like the game tracks the /played, so if that number as a percentage of time elapsed exceeds say 40%(means you are playing >60 hrs per week on average) - you get moved to “hardcore” server.
It a player problem. All those people want easy mode, look at the bonuses you get if your faction controls the whole map. Have to remove benefits, then people have no reason to switch factions. Every game that gives bonuses for being dominate faction runs into this.
In the mean time, my advise is deal with it or join them and exploit the hell out of the bonuses while it last … that is what most everyone else does.
I can tell you are new to MMOs because so many of these ideas are just incredibly flawed and open to easy exploitation of the systems you would be creating.
A few comments/pointers… When you are dying in world pvp and they are killing you in an area near your camp/at your camp, you aren’t supposed to keep respawning thee and expect them not to kill you. Since there are essentially no penalties to dying they are killing you in hopes that you stop respawning at the camps and respawn back in town so that they can “claim” that territory area. There is nothing wrong with it and it is standard to do so.
Regarding wars… They are not designed for play by pick up groups of people. Most Companies that actually want to win in wars are spending time (often multiple hours) prior to the war arranging the groups and making sure compositions are correct for various roles that groups will play in the war. If you are going in without that sort of planning and preparation you can’t expect to win, nor should you imo as Wars are not designed as a casual game mode with no consequences like OPR. Discord is pretty easy to use and every faction on my server has their own faction discord that they use for coordinating faction wide evens (wars, invasions, chest runs, etc).
I actually like this idea to some extent and that is coming from someone that is part of the dominant alliance in the dominant faction on my server and I am able to get into every war. I think it would be good if factions had to show some roster “depth”. Although I think the tuning has to be very carefully considered (and tbh might be far too much for this Dev team to implement without doing so horribly). On one hand I think that a faction should be forced to “show depth of roster” in wars, on the flip side, Wars are the one way where skill > numbers. With this system in place, numbers > skill in some scenarios. For example, a faction with a large number of players can much more easily push influence in multiple territories and get territorties into a conflict state (or on the flipside, prevent such from occurring). Thus, a faction with less players but with players of more skill it could become extremely difficult for them to hold multiple territories or use the situation to their advantage if they are on the attacking side/back foot.
Although it would encourage more territories to exchange hands theoretically. However, it could also lead to a faction just deciding to stalemate with one good territory and not attack or defend other territories because they do not want to be at greater risk of losing a prime territory. It could also lead to a lot of intrafaction strife where players in the same faction are upset with one another because they won’t commit players to certain wars So while I think this idea could be interesting I think it would have to be very well thought out so as to not create perverse incentive structures.
The benefits are really pretty marginal. I have been in the faction with the least territories and our faction later became the most dominant (now holding 5) and pretty much nothing has changed in my playing experience. Yeah it’s nice to transfer things between banks when I forget something in another city but you can’t transfer large amount of goods without paying a large tax and in some cases (i.e refining mats) it is cheaper to buy more than it is to transfer them. The azoth travel cost reduction is pretty minimal if you already have 3 houses spread across the map and with all the azoth sources in the game and the drop in the price of vials due to aptitude chests it isn’t very meaningful.
As expected Purple now controls all but two territories on the map. They have 70% or the player base on our server. There are not enough green or yellow to do anything. This AGS Game will die soon as there is no balance to the Faction System and human nature is to swap to the dominant Faction which happened as several yellow and green switched to purple just prior to purple becoming the dominant Faction based on territory control. Now yellow and green can’t switch to purple and our server will slowly die for lack of interaction. Server swap made our server worse then the one we swapped from. There is no incentive to continue playing on our server as the Purple are dominant and now have all the cash, zergs and do not have to worry about green or yellow even attempting any Wars as they can’t field enough players to push influence. Dead Server. Dead Game. Many green and yellow have left our server and all towns are just full of Purple by what appears to be a 10 to 1 margin not.
i dont agree with this. I have seen many good guilds loose their cities vs new born guilds.
WHAT I DO BELIEVE! is that this thing right now is like a monopoly game, those who managed to maintain cities like Windsward or Everfall (one of the most famous cities) now are fking rich with the best gear on the game, this make a snowball that is hard to stop.
The issue here, is that many of those guilds earned those cities with the exploits of the hatchet and icewall that we had at the beggining, and now, they are unreachable bc their main team are just too well geared up.
This happens on my server tbh, those 2 cities belong to one guild that defend any invasion and war without breaking a single sweat.
on the other hand… is just dominion of the strongest i think…
AGS team is aware of all of this. They did mention to make Everfall a not so “desirable” place to get (at some point). What’s their plan? no idea, as they have not released any specifics.
One thing I do believe will happen. Many servers will die out again due to faction monopoly. One company will control all and others will suffer, end up quitting the game or transferring out. Then we all cry again for more merges.
They will need to respond soon or the above will eventually happen.
I kind of wish they talked about this in details in their 1hr 30min video…
I know they mentioned something about having war fatigue and maybe implementing a 2-day cooldown between war declarations on a territory. But still, this isn’t enough. They need to implement a diminishing returns system when one faction controls 80-90% of the map and when one company controls 2+ territories.
Basically, there needs to be a way to make it un-appealing for 1 company (or faction) to conquer the entire map.
Some servers have tried to talk amongst themselves and keep 1 territory for a faction, minimum. But some companies don’t care and come in to swoop it for themselves. You cannot control that unfortunately.
Maybe they can make Everfall a “neutral ground”…who knows.
Some feedback on the wars (and some invasion things too):
Defense is too favoured
One particular issue is the respawn location, They are far too close to the point, which both leads to the issue of quick death rotations and makes single points a bit too hard to capture as you need to kill them at a too high rate.
At the same time this also diminishes benefits of ranged builds such as being able to contribute even when you aren’t close to the point, just because the GA/WH users get dropped within 10-15m of the point.
Defense war duration
While in an even war this is no problem. In a war where you are clearly superior, lets say a 20v50 match, waiting for 30 minutes for the timer is not an enjoyable experience.
War/invasion time
The time should be tied to the city, there is no point in having it tied to a company, especially considering how easy it is to circumvent it. If wars should be restricted in that sense, then it would likely have to be tied to the player, not the company. Such as a player would only be able to participate in 2-3 wars pr day, resets at midnight.
50 people is too many
Requiring 50 people for wars and invasions, personally feel like I have to show up to every war, and there is no way that the goals of the players align. Different settlements requiring different amount of players to maintain in wars (perhaps invasions) would allow for variety and some leniency for defending less important cities. Keeping Windsward and Everfall at 50 would make their income superiority more understandable aswell, while other settlements could potentially be more fit for smaller tight knit groups.
I feel artillery is too weak
They didnt seem to keep up well with gear scaling, but it’s still good enough to allocate resources both to destroy, defend and use, so arguably not too much of an issue.