Crowfall

What delay are you talking about?

Teekey_sl said:

Here's some from the Q&A today if you didn't participate.

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This is actually a pretty good Q&A because the answers are much more solid than previous ones. It makes me feel like they've hardened their design a bit more instead of just blurting out bullshit they think the audience wants to hear.

I'm with Draegan on this. You're asking the baker why his cardboard presentation cake looks stale when he's debating what flavor of cake to use.

Even if you changed your question to animation locking I think they've talked ad nauseum about it and the right answer is, "We'll try both and see what fits."

Draegan_sl said:

Here's what he's going to say, "All of combat mechanics, animations, and movements you saw in a video were only put together for promotional purposes and everything is being developed and revamped as we speak. We're going to be doing this all the way up to release."

You'll see me tonight discussing philosophical points on how combat can/should be worked in a game. It's typically how you get around dev speak.

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I think the biggest question I haven't seen really answered is what the typical gameplay is for a small group of people looking to exploit Irondick Mine and make a profit off it.

The same question for fishing in AA would be:
A few players take a fishing boat out to sea. They find a fishing hole. They spend some resource to chum the waters and activate the hole for everyone around them. They then start fishing which causes a 1-2 minute interactive mini-game to catch fish. As they catch fish they put the fish in their boat which makes it slower and more vulnerable. Other friendly players show up and start using the hole. A group of pirates shows up, the fishing raid fights them off. The boat fills up and the group takes it back to the docks to sell. The group of pirates show up en route and kill the players and take the fish. RIP their investment and earnings.

The same question for farming ore in Age of Conan would be:
A player goes to his favorite mining cave. He smokes a bowl and then mines the same 20 ore spawn locations for the next 30 hours doing the same shit over and over. (This is a real example and the guy that contributed several hundred USD worth of materials to us having the world first max-level keep in AoC did this).

Yeah but I didn't see any information on how the players acquire the ore in the first place. If it's just a static mine with infinite amounts of ore that the players mine themselves using a progress bar they'll have missed their mark, IMO.

Draegan_sl said:

Their answer is going to include some kind of "Risk vs. Reward" speech.
My follow up would be, are there enough POI's where each one isn't so over used that you end up making a patrol rotation and there is no mystery?

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I actually feel like the opposite is the bigger problem. If there are too many it's too costly for PKs to find resource gatherers, much less kill them, and then it's just PvE without much PvP.

Draegan_sl said:

There's a balance to be had. You don't want to spread everyone out too thin and you don't want to cramp up everyone either.

I wonder if their world tools allow them to make world's like a civ map

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I think the solution to that is to have tiers of resource-goodness. Most games naturally have that through natural application of resources, but it's important for it to be very deliberate and obvious.

I'll use fish in AA as an example here because I think it's the best pvp resource gathering system in any game I've seen. There are two spectrums of goodness. The type of fish (sturgeon<tuna<sailfish<marlin) and proximity to the docks to sell the fish (the further away the more risk and the longer it takes to travel). This means that the game naturally will congregate the fishing raids close to the docks and if there were too many fishermen they could spread out around the world more.

Here's where the system fails though:
1. There are too many docks and too many possible places for the marlin spawns that if there's only 100 fishermen active at a given time they are super spread out and pirates can't find them easily enough to make piracy worth it. It'd be better if there was one dock in the world with 'deluxe marlin' spawns around it and players could choose to either take the high risk, high pvp, high reward area or take the lower risk, lower reward marlin spawns somewhere else.

2. The fishing pools don't get worse with more people fishing it. In general you want as many fisherman next to you as possible because you make a harder target while fishing and there's less of a chance a pirate will choose your boat.

This is especially true if you're in FRX (pronounced Fish RX) because you've built up a reputation of the entire raid rucking up whenever attack someone in FRX and if you manage to steal a boat the entire guild rucks up to fight you over it. Maybe you're good and you get a boat away from the FRX raid. When you get to the turn in to profit on your work you find there's 50 FRX members waiting for you. So we generally are left alone compared to other guilds...

What should happen instead is that the more people on a spawn the quicker it dissipates and the longer it takes to catch fish before the hole is gone.




So TLDR: Every resource system should have clear tiers of goodness with very few of the best tier and make them in very known areas for the hard-dicked PvP badasses to fight over and have peasant-tier resources around the world for everyone else. And every resource system should naturally get worse the more people use it.

I kind of like the alloy system since it provides the same sub-component system we all know about but extends it to have visual possibilities.

Imagine you're rolling up to a resource area and ten dudes crest over a hill toward you with murderous intent. One of them is wearing all Polished Steel which is a pure-tanking set. The other is wearing brass ringmail and peacock feathers which is a pure-DPS set. There's no need for class descriptions or tells or any nonsense. You can visually see that one is a tank that's going to jump into your raid and start their CC rotation until you start focusing on him and one is a DPS class that's going to pop out of stealth and eviscerate your healer.