Crowfall

Eidal · Feb 25, 2015

Vitality_sl said:
I'm not sure Eve is decently safe, I get suicide popped after getting cargo scanned outside jita more than I'd care to admit.

Overall, my carebear friends that PVE'd in Eve taught themselves the RoE for highsec and understood that transporting goods carried a risk. They knew how to fly under this radar and they were content with the system, and actually enjoyed it in the same method that roaming gryphons/giants lent an aura of danger to open world exping in EQ. So, for my anecdotal sample size, Eve was sufficiently safe.

My concern now is that IF carebears in Crowfall have to go to a PVP campaign to get any mats, then there will be a huge huge flock of PVPers that are there simply to collect tears. This dynamic won't last long.

Vitality · Feb 25, 2015

Your concern is warranted and I highly doubt Artcraft would funnel sheep into a wolves den on this one. If they did they'd lose out on market share.

Blue Survival campaign (with modified lower export rates of course) is essential for capturing your described audience.

I wonder what steps we can take to press this interest in some official capacity.

Eidal · Feb 25, 2015

Honestly, even amongst my gung-ho PVP friends, they too appreciate a place to go and "cool-off". The demographic of people who want absolutely nothing but non-stop edge-of-the-seat PVP madness is probably quite small.

I do think I should point out that I always thought the risk versus reward in Eve was fucked up to some degree. The plethora of high-sec alts from null-sec PVPers demonstrate the problem. A zero-variance 50mil>hour beats out over high-variance 125mil>hour in most cases, without even mentioning how one can chillax in Eve and watch youtube while grinding in high-sec when that's a death sentence anywhere else.

Vitality · Feb 25, 2015

The fact that we don't know that much about what kind of rulesets they intend to launch alpha/beta makes it a bit unfair to snap-judge it as a hardcore balls to the walls nulsec red or dead type of game.

They've already stated that a ruleset at launch (Bloodstone/shard thingy) will have some form of peace time. That's enough for me to keep an open mind about the different campaigns.

Eidal · Feb 25, 2015

True Vit, obviously this is pre-alpha and everything is up in the air. They've been pretty upfront about WELCOMING new variations etc etc.

I do, however, think that over the next 29 days while they raise money, they could do more to appeal to the enormous market of blue players. If you look at the Kickstarter, one of the first things that stands out is that the lead devs are SB/UO devs. This immediately soured my buddy to it and he made some salty comment about how "getting owned by kids isn't how I choose to spend my time these days."

I suspect that, without any sort of clarification of their stance on how blues fit into their game, they are leaving a substantial amount of money on the table.

Draegan_sl · Feb 25, 2015

This game is niche and they are marketing that way. Th em have specifically said they don't want to sour their vision just to sell more boxes.

Vitality · Feb 25, 2015

Your friend seems to have a fair amount of prejudice against this because SB/UO - These guys ate a bucket load of shit for those two games. To the point of long-winded apology posts for trammel and what not.

I'm not about to shill here for them as I was barely hitting puberty at the time. I've heard the stories though and the criticism is warranted.

However, the interest for a pvp focused game is there as seen in the kickstarter 1 day volume. This might not be the game for your buddy. Atleast not this early in the dev cycle.

@Dreagan: I'm not convinced they're going to switch gears for the blue market either, but I'm not putting it past them to open up a campaign that favors the market somewhat (but not entirely). They sold out in the Trammel days and I don't think they intend on repeating this failure

Property protection is really the key here.

@Eidal: What does your buddy play right now?

Draegan_sl · Feb 25, 2015

There are already low risk stuff people are going to be into with very low reward retention.

I don't understand that we'll myself. When they said you keep x% of your resources, is that what you have in hand at the last second? Or what you accumulated?

How does banking work?

I'm confused about carry over and gear and itemization.

Tuco · Feb 25, 2015

Eidal_sl said:
How do you plan to deal with the overwhelming majority of MMO players that would rather PVE with minimal PVP risk yet still feel like they're participating in the world?

The question is how much PvP is acceptable to those players. If they want to be completely safe and be able to farm in peace, then they can find another game. If they want to be able to find low-risk/low-reward areas and farm while experiencing the risk of PvP but not have to fight every second for what they get, then I think the answer is easy: the natural resource generation will spawn high-resource areas and low resource areas. Timmy Needledick can go to Bareass Mine and get pebbles of copper off in the corner of the map. Nobody will bother him because it's not worth the effort. Meanwhile I'll be mining in Irondick mine getting phat iron ore while Vitality roams up and tries to PK me before he gets zerged.

If they ever cave and market this to the PVE crowd they've not only lost their vision for the game by trammeling it, but they've also dramatically increased the scope of the game. Providing a basic PVE backdrop for a PVP environment is easy. Providing a compelling PVE experience on its own is much more difficult.

Vitality · Feb 25, 2015

Essentially you collect VP (victory points) and the particular faction/guild or top# of players in a FFA setting get to carry over a set amount of resources from their campaign. It's not known yet how banks and player storage functions. Losing a campaign (in some situations) provides a much lower export rate.

Their item retention (export) rates are based on the amount of risk involved in the ruleset. FFA being the most risky and 3 faction protected stuff being the least risky out of the known structures.

The win conditions and victory point collection mechanics are unique to each ruleset.

Tuco · Feb 25, 2015

Draegan_sl said:
Yeah. I think Tuco is putting the wrong spin on it in his head. EK is basically the low risk or no risk place you can hang out when not campaigning. (can you visit it during a campaign?). I don't think it's supposed to be a major game play focus on the scale of campaigns. It's more of a persistent space so players ha E the feeling of roots in the game universe and not just a lobby game for campaigns.

Ok sure. It's the Orgrimmar/Dalaran/Plane of Knowledge of Crowfall. But they're hyping up a big part of the reward system to give you resources to build that place. I can understand wanting to make a base of operations and build up top rank crafting/skill areas ala Shadowbane, but is there anything beyond that? If PRX has the most baller castle of all time does that help us in anyway?

If there's free form building I'm going to have to force Intropy to play CF with us just to consult our building...

Vitality · Feb 25, 2015

It really depends on how you market your baller ass castle Tuco, if you somehow turn it into a trading or arena/pvp dueling hub then tax income is a thing.

As far as the structure itself, I doubt it impacts much more than possibly storage space or other ammenities. Freeform building is in - it's freeform doodad placement as seen in the most recent videos.

I doubt they'll offer guild wide power increases for larger castles, they could though, like in VG having the dragon head in your keep gave your guild castle gave your guild a crazy ass buff. *ancient port warehouse*

That's just speculation though.

** I'd hangout at your guild plot and duel your best members etc.

Teekey · Feb 25, 2015

The Developers have been pretty vocal about this game not being for everyone, and that there is going to be some risk involved for everyone, no matter how much they want to minimize if.

That said, we know there are PvE elements like mobs go kill and collect resources from, and certainly just the natural resource collection in the world. As long as you're fine accepting that you'll be collecting scraps while the PvPers take control over the rich mines, I don't see an issue.

I'm sure PvPers will even go the extra mile to protect their crafters at all costs, because they'll provide that big of a boost in the dying worlds.

Tol_sl · Feb 25, 2015

The vibe I get -and I could be totally talking out of my ass here, so feel free to confirm or deny- is that the EK is like your trophy hall or private housing outside of a campaign. It's a persistent place that you improve and take things back to in between campaigns, and see it progressively get more and more baller and full of campaign trophies ('super bowl rings'). When a new campaign starts, you can bring some of your shit with you, but that's limited by the campaign rules. I don't think it's intended to be anything more than private housing or to be a a tactical thing. It's just a status symbol that gives you something to improve the more campaigns you play and store your stuff after a world dies.

Vitality · Feb 25, 2015

Tol, there's a fealty system in place for giving out plots and linking other plots together. Adjustable PVP rulesets for the plots etc. It's basically a Minecraft server without major resource generating nodes like Mills/quarries/mines.

They even make you pay a real money price for increasing your EK server capacity like a minecraft server would.

It's a bit more than just a trophy hall. Especially since it seems the economy is going to be player shops and vendors.

Draegan_sl · Feb 25, 2015

To me it sounds like Instanced versions of player stores. I don't think there are any expected AH feature. Just local markets.

Teekey · Feb 25, 2015

Tuco_sl said:
If PRX has the most baller castle of all time does that help us in anyway?

This has yet to be adequately answered.

We know victories will provide 'trophies' that give advantages

But, while I assume the most powerful guilds will likely spread their resources across multiple campaigns, what about guilds that solely play FFA where they can't import gear from the EK?

What does having a beefed up castle with all the crafting bells and whistles do for them?

Draegan_sl · Feb 25, 2015

Yeah we those deets.

Tuco · Feb 25, 2015

The other big question is how to determine the rewards for a given campaign. In GW2 the campaigns were split up into tiers with a clear delineation. If you weren't in Tier1 few people in the general community cared if you won (the only time it was that exciting was when an influx of players joined a lower tier and started climbing the ranks, like when we joined #10 server, Sea of Sorrows and brought it to rank #1.).

In ArcheAge on release you had clear servers that had the best competition, Aranzeb, Ollo and Kyrios. Meanwhile guilds like Oran'Thul and Team Legacy piled into the most empty servers and dominated them. (TL actually was on Ollo or aranzeb at first and actually moved servers to Enla post release because they were afraid of competition!). OT got 2 castles I think, TL got 4 and we got 1. If the 'campaign' ended and we all brought home our trophies rated by how many castles you won, they'd walk away with the better trophies.

The same will likely happen in Crowfall. You might have 15 powerhouse guilds in the game at release, ten of which have big dicks and want to fight each other on the same campaigns, the other 5 have needledicks and will go to the easiest campaigns they can find. At the end of those campaigns, the 5 needledick guilds will have easy victories and max out their rewards.

This is also related to the issue of guilds trading campaign wins.

Vitality · Feb 25, 2015

On the subject of win trading in a guild setting: Artcraft mentioned that at the end of the various seasons in a campaign they'll look and see if any of the rules or side advantage modifiers etc need to be adjusted on the fly. This may harm or help that particular circumstance.

Example: Hypothetically If guild A is crushing gvg constantly the export rates of the campaign maybe get tweaked for the losing guilds to incentivize not quitting. Or something is implented to incentivize other guilds to fight Guild A.

Again, mostly speculative as far as their involvement in this kind of stuff.

On the 3 faction server the third faction (balance) will be incentivized heavily in making sure order and chaos are as close as possible on the standings at the end of the campaign.

Crowfall

Molten Core Raider

ＨＵＳＴＬＥ

Molten Core Raider

ＨＵＳＴＬＥ

Molten Core Raider

2 Minutes Hate

ＨＵＳＴＬＥ

2 Minutes Hate

I got Tuco'd!

ＨＵＳＴＬＥ

I got Tuco'd!

ＨＵＳＴＬＥ

Mr. Poopybutthole

shitlord

ＨＵＳＴＬＥ

2 Minutes Hate

Mr. Poopybutthole

2 Minutes Hate

I got Tuco'd!

ＨＵＳＴＬＥ