Crowfall deals a blow to the Zerg!!

Slapshot1188

In what is undoubtedly a smart move, Crowfall has announced that they will be limiting Alliances to 500 rostered players.  Currently I believe it's 2500 which is absolutely bonkers.  Remember, the zones have a 250 player cap... So even 500 player guild are ridiculous, but this is a GOOD step.  Having multiple zerg guilds ally up instead of fight was stupid.  Looks like Artcraft is listening more and more to voices outside the Ivory Tower.  Just like with Faction servers though, the question remains:  Is it too late... is the damage already done?

Here is the statement:

Alliances were designed to help the smaller guilds align their forces to be on an even footing with larger guilds.

With the launch of Update 7.100, the max number of members in an alliance will be locked at 500 players. If a guild within the alliance adds members which pushes the alliance over the maximum cap of 500 players, that guild will automatically be removed from the Alliance.

https://community.crowfall.com/topic/32971-upcoming-change-to-alliance-cap-with-update-7100/

Scorchien

The big picture it does not matter what they do ..

   like i said weeks ago .. F2P inside 13 months .. Shuttered inside 3 years ..

mcrippins

IMO any game can come back from the dead under the right circumstances. Genuinely hoping Crowfall finds a way.

Ungood

This change will not be a net positive.

Slapshot1188

Scorchien said:

The big picture it does not matter what they do ..

   like i said weeks ago .. F2P inside 13 months .. Shuttered inside 3 years ..

Could be.  But at least they are making changes.  I think it's probably too late as they chased off too many prospective players, but we will see.

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Slapshot1188

Mtibbs1989 said:

Ungood said:

This change will not be a net positive.

The current state wasn't going to net a positive either, I was in the largest US West alliance and we handedly won the first campaign without issue. At least politics can be played out with smaller alliance sizes.

How did anyone think that allowing 2500 player alliances in a game where you can only have 250 players in a zone was a good idea?  But it's also 500 player guilds....  Given the small zone sizes I have no idea why they went with 500 player guilds.  Well I do know... because they listened to certain groups that steered them wrong.  Same thing with not having Shadow campaigns at launch.   So many mistakes...

But again, at least they are now starting to see the folks they listened to were flat out wrong.   Better to try and fix it than give up.

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Ungood

Mtibbs1989 said:

Ungood said:

This change will not be a net positive.

The previous state of a theoretical 2,500 player alliance wasn't going to net a positive either, I was in the largest US West alliance and we handedly won the first campaign without issue. At least politics can be played out with smaller alliance sizes.

With the previous limitations (2,500), it provided the ability for a singular alliance to completely control an entire server without issue and at that point, it defeats the purpose of a game that revolves around a throne war.

You and I both know Throne Wars are about Coverage, not raw numbers. The Zones were capped at 250 per, so, anyone that was truly controlling the situation, simply had coverage and good leadership.

We both know this, the Teams with the Best Coverage and Leadership will win, hands down, every game. 

Slapshot1188

Ungood said:

Mtibbs1989 said:

Ungood said:

This change will not be a net positive.

The previous state of a theoretical 2,500 player alliance wasn't going to net a positive either, I was in the largest US West alliance and we handedly won the first campaign without issue. At least politics can be played out with smaller alliance sizes.

With the previous limitations (2,500), it provided the ability for a singular alliance to completely control an entire server without issue and at that point, it defeats the purpose of a game that revolves around a throne war.

You and I both know Throne Wars are about Coverage, not raw numbers. The Zones were capped at 250 per, so, anyone that was truly controlling the situation, simply had coverage and good leadership.

We both know this, the Teams with the Best Coverage and Leadership will win, hands down, every game. 

That is utterly wrong.  The zones are capped due to technical limitations.  Artcraft has admitted this and is working to increase the cap. It was 175, 200.. etc...

Anyone who actually plays the game knows this.  

Here is a quote from Coleman to help explain it to you.  So no... it’s not due to “Coverage” and “Leadership”... ROFL

   On 6/18/2021 at 11:26 AM, jtoddcoleman said: 

Yes, it is a technical limitation.   And it is not a limitation that is unique to our game -- it is no small feat to get 200 players in the same area, fighting in real time with action combat in an open world, with dynamic systems like city creation and destruction.  It's an enormously complex problem that most games don't even attempt to solve.  Other companies with far more resources have not even achieved that threshold for their PvP zones.  I know this isn't the answer that you want, but it is a technical reality.  

In case you are wondering, that was a response to this question:

   On 6/15/2021 at 10:23 PM,  Spawlsaid: 

We all saw the patch notes, moving the zone cap from 175 to 200. I hate to say it but you are going to have some significant issues if you can't double that. I am not sure what you are going for regarding population in each campaign, the volume of zones, the volume of holdings to fight over but 200 people in one zone is not enough. I'm not sure if you are capable, if that is a reality you are now facing and that it will not improve but if that is the size we are limited to, we are going to have sieges where zones are capped and people will just stay logged in so nobody else can enter. That will not be any sort of competitive throne war simulator. 

2 holdings in 1 zone, there are guilds that can fill that 200 number out.

Kyleran

It's often been said Unity is not the best choice when trying to design large scale MMORPGS, looks like the Crowfall team knew this, but pressed forward as they were going with the concept of multiple smaller shards and not trying for 500 vs 500 battles.

As such, the Guild or Alliance caps per instance should be quite small, say 25 to 50 tops...

Scot

Now with smaller zergs!

Slapshot1188

Kyleran said:

It's often been said Unity is not the best choice when trying to design large scale MMORPGS, looks like the Crowfall team knew this, but pressed forward as they were going with the concept of multiple smaller shards and not trying for 500 vs 500 battles.

As such, the Guild or Alliance caps per instance should be quite small, say 25 to 50 tops...

I agree, but this goes right back to the whole Ivory Tower.  They should have focused on the constraints of the engine when making decisions about guild sizes and alliance sizes.   

Common sense says that it's a LOT easier to go and adjust Guild Sizes (and Alliances) higher than it is to go back and make them lower after launch.   Now you have lots of complaints (with some validity) about having to cut low active members, etc...

As is a common theme here, their launch plan was not well thought out and they often swing wildly like a pendulum to the other side.  This is all stuff that SHOULD have been worked out in Beta so that when they launched that had reasonably consistent rules and designs.

But I guess they figured some people would just listen to what they heard from a friend who passed it down from tribal knowledge that the zone caps were to enable "Leadership" and "Coverage".   Sorry, still can't believe that comment and the tone in which it was made.  

lashlash

Can this Unity meme die already. Unity has nothing to do with the limitations, it has everything to do with N squared (where N = players in the same PvP battle) server bandwidth constraints. They have to design around it. The only comparable game with high tick-rate, real-time combat and high numbers of players, is Planetside 2, which caps at 300 simultaneous interactions by players. They have a custom back-end to achieve this, just like Crowfall back-end is customized. Plantetside 2 have to do things like trusting the client more (therefore open to more cheats), and also doing game mechanics that incentivize spreading the players.

Kyleran

lashlash said:

Can this Unity meme die already. Unity has nothing to do with the limitations, it has everything to do with N squared (where N = players in the same PvP battle) server bandwidth constraints. They have to design around it. The only comparable game with high tick-rate, real-time combat and high numbers of players, is Planetside 2, which caps at 300 simultaneous interactions by players. They have a custom back-end to achieve this, just like Crowfall back-end is customized. Plantetside 2 have to do things like trusting the client more (therefore open to more cheats), and also doing game mechanics that incentivize spreading the players.

Lineage 2 supports high numbers of players, as does EVE and even Darkfall back in it's day.

CU supports more than two of those but since it's not a full game yet can't really count it in the list.

None of the above use Unity to my knowledge, but if there's a Unity based game which has decently high numbers which runs well feel free to share

Scorchien

Ive been in over 500vs500 in Warhammer emu pretty often in the past years and have no trouble ..

   Altho you must take the steps they have on the site to optimize the client ..

  But it works and is fun

Quizzical

If the cap is on number of players per alliance, then that's going to heavily reward the players who play the game really a lot.  Someone who only plays for a few hours per week would have to be kicked from any competitive alliances to free up a spot for someone who plays the game more.  A game that only appeals to the hardest of hardcore players isn't going to have much of an audience, as most gamers have other things to do.

Slapshot1188

tzervo said:

Kyleran said:

Lineage 2 supports high numbers of players, as does EVE and even Darkfall back in it's day.

CU supports more than two of those but since it's not a full game yet can't really count it in the list.

None of the above use Unity to my knowledge, but if there's a Unity based game which has decently high numbers which runs well feel free to share

EVE cheats with time dilation though. Regardless, housing thousands of players in  a single battle is no small feat.

Albion uses Unity:

Albion Online l FUTURISTIC (56) VS ARCH (256) ZVZ HUGE CONTENT - YouTube

They cap zones too, haven't seen anything like the size of 500 vs 500 like other examples in Albion.

I think the key is simply to work within your constraints.

What is the guild size cap on Albion vs Crowfall?
What is the zone cap size of Albion vs Crowfall?

IMHO having a 500 player guild/alliance cap when zone cap is 250... not the greatest design plan.  But still FAR better than allowing a 2500 player Alliance.

carterza

Kyleran said:

It's often been said Unity is not the best choice when trying to design large scale MMORPGS, looks like the Crowfall team knew this, but pressed forward as they were going with the concept of multiple smaller shards and not trying for 500 vs 500 battles.

As such, the Guild or Alliance caps per instance should be quite small, say 25 to 50 tops...

It's often been said that armchair game developers shouldn't pretend like they know what they're talking about...

Most of the issues that players experience in these large scale MMOs like EvE, SB, Crowfall, DAoC, etc... have absolutely nothing to do with the game client and everything to do with the game server (which guess what? doesn't rely on a game engine to function). You're just spreading FUD about Unity really. I don't even use Unity outside of work (and I don't work in games for a living anymore), but I know that Unity is not the source of Crowfall's issues when it comes to large scale siege performance.

You simply don't know what you're typing about.

Kyleran

carterza said:

Kyleran said:

It's often been said Unity is not the best choice when trying to design large scale MMORPGS, looks like the Crowfall team knew this, but pressed forward as they were going with the concept of multiple smaller shards and not trying for 500 vs 500 battles.

As such, the Guild or Alliance caps per instance should be quite small, say 25 to 50 tops...

It's often been said that armchair game developers shouldn't pretend like they know what they're talking about...

Most of the issues that players experience in these large scale MMOs like EvE, SB, Crowfall, DAoC, etc... have absolutely nothing to do with the game client and everything to do with the game server (which guess what? doesn't rely on a game engine to function). You're just spreading FUD about Unity really. I don't even use Unity outside of work (and I don't work in games for a living anymore), but I know that Unity is not the source of Crowfall's issues when it comes to large scale siege performance.

You simply don't know what you're typing about.

Said the pot to the kettle. No surprise why you aren't in the gaming business anymore.

Here's some posts to help you understand..

"I've discovered a few decent optimisations that you can make with your hardware and software to help Crowfall (mostly Unity) run faster"

https://community.crowfall.com/topic/27842-improve-your-crowfall-performance-today/

"Like in any other MMO performance is mostly dependent on CPU and memory. Even if you have a good GPU, performance may suck. Check out https://community.crowfall.com/topic/27842-improve-your-crowfall-performance-today Btw patch on TEST got more FPS and optimisation is ongoing task, FPS becomes better every major patch."

https://amp.reddit.com/r/crowfall/comments/o3s20j/crowfall_performance_is_bad_or_just_me/

Ungood

Quizzical said:

If the cap is on number of players per alliance, then that's going to heavily reward the players who play the game really a lot.  Someone who only plays for a few hours per week would have to be kicked from any competitive alliances to free up a spot for someone who plays the game more.  A game that only appeals to the hardest of hardcore players isn't going to have much of an audience, as most gamers have other things to do.

Actually it's worse.

It's based on guild size, so if say, you have 9 friends in your guild, and only 3 of them play, your guild is taking up 6 unused slots in the alliance, or put another way, you are taking up 9 slots, and only providing 3 active players, which means your guild is a liability, as opposed to an asset, and any alliance that wants to be competitive will kick your guild.

So this might still maintain putting small guilds at a disadvantage, especially guilds of friends, that sometimes play, but not enough to be active.

Slapshot1188

Ungood said:

Quizzical said:

If the cap is on number of players per alliance, then that's going to heavily reward the players who play the game really a lot.  Someone who only plays for a few hours per week would have to be kicked from any competitive alliances to free up a spot for someone who plays the game more.  A game that only appeals to the hardest of hardcore players isn't going to have much of an audience, as most gamers have other things to do.

Actually it's worse.

It's based on guild size, so if say, you have 9 friends in your guild, and only 3 of them play, your guild is taking up 6 unused slots in the alliance, or put another way, you are taking up 9 slots, and only providing 3 active players, which means your guild is a liability, as opposed to an asset, and any alliance that wants to be competitive will kick your guild.

So this might still maintain putting small guilds at a disadvantage, especially guilds of friends, that sometimes play, but not enough to be active.

The flipside of this is that it will encourage 500 zerg guilds to act on their own and not blob the server with 2500 player alliances.    The smaller guilds can then make their own 500 player alliances to be on equal footing with the 500 player ones.  

Personally, I think 500 is still far too big for a game that has 250 player zone caps. 

You have to work within the constraints of the game design.  I believe Albion for example has a much larger zone cap and much smaller guild cap, and they have been successful even though they also have complaints and discussions about caps and limits on alliances and guilds.

Ungood

Slapshot1188 said:

Ungood said:

Quizzical said:

If the cap is on number of players per alliance, then that's going to heavily reward the players who play the game really a lot.  Someone who only plays for a few hours per week would have to be kicked from any competitive alliances to free up a spot for someone who plays the game more.  A game that only appeals to the hardest of hardcore players isn't going to have much of an audience, as most gamers have other things to do.

Actually it's worse.

It's based on guild size, so if say, you have 9 friends in your guild, and only 3 of them play, your guild is taking up 6 unused slots in the alliance, or put another way, you are taking up 9 slots, and only providing 3 active players, which means your guild is a liability, as opposed to an asset, and any alliance that wants to be competitive will kick your guild.

So this might still maintain putting small guilds at a disadvantage, especially guilds of friends, that sometimes play, but not enough to be active.

The flipside of this is that it will encourage 500 zerg guilds to act on their own and not blob the server with 2500 player alliances.    The smaller guilds can then make their own 500 player alliances to be on equal footing with the 500 player ones.  

Personally, I think 500 is still far too big for a game that has 250 player zone caps. 

You have to work within the constraints of the game design.  I believe Albion for example has a much larger zone cap and much smaller guild cap, and they have been successful even though they also have complaints and discussions about caps and limits on alliances and guilds.

Again, you don't get how throne war games work, so I am not going to try and explain this too you yet again.

In any case, small guilds will suffer from this, and large guilds will still dominate, nothing will change in that venture.

Slapshot1188

Ungood said:

Slapshot1188 said:

Ungood said:

Quizzical said:

If the cap is on number of players per alliance, then that's going to heavily reward the players who play the game really a lot.  Someone who only plays for a few hours per week would have to be kicked from any competitive alliances to free up a spot for someone who plays the game more.  A game that only appeals to the hardest of hardcore players isn't going to have much of an audience, as most gamers have other things to do.

Actually it's worse.

It's based on guild size, so if say, you have 9 friends in your guild, and only 3 of them play, your guild is taking up 6 unused slots in the alliance, or put another way, you are taking up 9 slots, and only providing 3 active players, which means your guild is a liability, as opposed to an asset, and any alliance that wants to be competitive will kick your guild.

So this might still maintain putting small guilds at a disadvantage, especially guilds of friends, that sometimes play, but not enough to be active.

The flipside of this is that it will encourage 500 zerg guilds to act on their own and not blob the server with 2500 player alliances.    The smaller guilds can then make their own 500 player alliances to be on equal footing with the 500 player ones.  

Personally, I think 500 is still far too big for a game that has 250 player zone caps. 

You have to work within the constraints of the game design.  I believe Albion for example has a much larger zone cap and much smaller guild cap, and they have been successful even though they also have complaints and discussions about caps and limits on alliances and guilds.

Again, you don't get how throne war games work, so I am not going to try and explain this too you yet again.

In any case, small guilds will suffer from this, and large guilds will still dominate, nothing will change in that venture.

Sure Dude.

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