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Funcom Fails Again - Age of Conan Battlekeeps
Ever since launch, all the top guilds in Age of Conan were stuck at Tier 2 guild cities due to a bug. That bug got fixed yesterday, and it allowed guilds to finally build Tier 3 guild cities. The cities themselves don't do much (yet), as most of the city features are not yet implemented, but the reason everyone wanted a Tier 3 city was PvP - it's a prerequisite to build a Battlekeep to the borderlands PvP areas.
So, in very short order the biggest guilds built the first Battlekeeps, and once they got that out of the way, they naturally tried to participate on the "endgame" PvP by sieging another Battlekeep built by a competing guild. Just one small problem; The game mechanics in Age of Conan do not allow that.
Funcom has designed the system so that you can only attack a Battlekeep if your guild doesn't already have a keep of their own. With 9 pre-designated spots for Battlekeeps per server, anyone who has played just about any MMO with guilds can immediately see the problem; On any given server, no matter how big, the top guilds tend to "scoop up" a large percentage of the players. It's true for a lightly populated WoW server, it's true for the massive universe of EVE Online - the actual server size doesn't matter. I would venture a guess that the Battlekeep-owning guilds in any given server would consist of over 50% of the population on that server - perhaps even more.
With all the "hardcore" players concentrated into these top guilds, what's left over to attack these keeps is a number of smaller rag-tag guilds and unguilded casuals. Or, in other words, nobody. So, the "massive PvP battles" of Age of Conan are not happening due to a small, "unforeseen", design error by Funcom. You can also look the situation from another perspective - if you are interested in proactively participating in the much-promoted massive PvP battles, you can't build a Battlekeep of your own, or you are forced to defend, and only defend it.
Hopefully Funcom can rapidly devise a working fix. An obvious quick hack would be to allow other keep holders to raid and raze competing keeps without the ability to capture them, but considering the amount of materials needed to build a keep, I'm not sure how feasible that is. Another potential fix would be to dynamically adjust the number of available keep plots to ensure that there are less plots than high end guilds per server, but even that would leave the problem of forcing keep holders to a defensive posture. It might also drive guilds to merge up, and once again there would be "too many" keep spots and no PvP battles.
Only one thing is sure; Funcom's game design is once again falling a tad short of expectations set by the pre-launch PR campaign
Update: When initially writing the story, I failed to consider the 48 vs. 48 limitation on keep sieges. Apologies. So let's take that into account.
It's true that large guilds (500+ members) might rapidly run into issues as their members can't participate in the PvP action they hoped for due to this limitation. Assuming Funcom doesn't cave in when the whining starts, the solution is to fragment these guilds into smaller PvP siege guilds. With around 50-100 members - enough to consistently field a 48-man siege team - it would mean that at least on some servers there would be enough of these guilds so that the server will eventually end up with nine battlekeeps and guilds of similar size waiting more - initiating conflict. However, the task of collecting materials to build everything up (Tier 3 city) is massive for a small guild, and in any case I doubt there will be proper sieges for a long time under the current model. Yet if the smaller guilds are independent only in name and actually allied - with or without actual game support for Alliances - it may be possible that we see the system working in some way.
Naturally this only works if we have several strong factions per server - the design breaks as soon as one big alliance has all the battlekeeps in control with nine "proxy guilds". In any case, the design has some serious issues as it doesn't scale in any way to accommodate for the different number of players and guilds each server has as the "9 battlekeep spots" is a constant. I'm still not convinced Funcom has really plotted it all out.
http://www.yougamers.com/news/19289_funcom_fails_again_-_age_of_conan_battlekeeps/
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This game was far from ready. Should of pushed the release date back 6 months to polish the game and finish it. But its Funcom, they dont exacley have a good track record.
Comments
lol
So can someone explain why you can only attack a Battlekeep if you don't have one of your own? I understand the 48 vs. 48 cap. But this sounds really, really stupid. If it takes alot of resources to build one then the biggest guilds would have them...but they would be stuck defending? That's only half the fun.
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A human and an Elf get captured by Skaven. The rat-men are getting ready to shoot the first hostage with Dwarf-made guns when he yells, "Earthquake!" The naturally nervous Skaven run and hide from the imaginary threat. He escapes. The Skaven regroup and bring out the Elf. Being very smart, the Elf has figured out what to do. When the Skaven get ready to shoot, the Elf, in order to scare them, yells, "Fire!"
Order of the White Border.
OMG .....This is getting rediculos...
Now that information just changed everything for me...... I had a little hope left, but now its gone. WTF are these devs thinking?
Edit:
Are they trying to drive people away ?
Not only has Funcom dropped the ball.....they are watching it roll away..
Wow. Just wow.
Is this "working as intended"? If so:
1) What is the rationale behind this? Seems incredibly stupid. Isn't the whole point to have the big guilds duke it out?
2) Why was this restriction never mentioned by Funcom?
Dude, nice book, and if you are in hardcore mode right now mabey i feel bad for you. A little bit.
Truth is: They will alter the game. They will adjust the rules. Things will *gasp* change!
Do you think the devs spent all this time designing a game of siege, and not want to encourage ... sieging?!
Relax.
Ok, lets look at avalibilty of sieging:
1) You can only attack a battlekeep if you don't have one of your own,
2) only 48 people can participate in an attack (attack being the key word here),
3) only 9 keeps per server, with each their unique attackable time window,
Is it just me or does the whole siege system seems like a minor feature that got bloated over by PR department?
This is my attitude in general at the moment. There's a lot to be fixed and I've been taking a slow "they'll fix it" attitude with AoC.
Still... this issue with the keeps is a mighty boneheaded mistake.
Do we think that? Well we didn't think that, but now we are starting to because well all sign point to yes.
Either
a) they have done absolutely no QA
-or-
b) Their design looks like it sucks balls
Neither one is good is a good sign. Putting up some canard like "change" is the height political empty puffed up shirt rhetoric. And certainly won't do jack poop to counter actual evidence. Waht kind of change? If there current behavior is any indication it won't be good change.
Fomr what we can tell right now, it will be poorly thought out. Barely tested. And take back seat to a number of other things.
Oh right I forgot things will change and change is always good that must be why the NGE is doing so well.
*awaits amazingavery's words of wisdom*
**BTW this is just a joke.....don't be hatin'!*
relax... everything is okay... the world is still spinning... relax.. take a deep breath.. you should feel better by now.
I assume Avery's best course of action would be to ramble on about how this will give the unguilded and casual playerbase a chance to raise and defeat the oppressors, keeping the game true to the brutal nature of the Conan universe. This and something about that the guilds with a keep will be very end game and few in numbers.
.. Might work ^^.
Related forum thread - asking for this to be revised
forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php
EQ2 fan sites
Its pretty much a scaled down version of Notum Wars. They probably figured that if it worked in AO it would work here as well. The only problem is AO used 2 servers for all the players and had a ton of open land spots spanning all the level ranges. They also allowed huge battles, so everyone could help everyone take a base.
I can understand not being able to take another keep if you already have one, but you should still be able to assist in helping another guild take the keep. But as it stands now keep battles will be pretty stagnant for a while until other guilds get large enough to start warring.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
So that one guild doesn't absorb the server.. They will adjust rules to make sense. All you need to do is dig up some radio interviews with the lead designer and listen to him for a while to realize that.
Thanks for the daily gloom and doom though. You would make an awesome 5 o'clock reporter.
yeah there goes any fun for guilds with battle keeps to help storm (but not take) other guilds battlekeeps...have fun sitting in your keep defending constantly
yeah there goes any fun for guilds with battle keeps to help storm (but not take) other guilds battlekeeps...have fun sitting in your keep defending constantly
I doubt they will keep it where guild members with a keep won't be able to be a mercenary for another guild. They talked a lot about these systems, and that would just be foolish. I bet within a month or two when these sieges start happening regularly it will be tweaked.
I know that they made it where a guild gained something like points as they destroyed areas and how long they fought so if everything inside is based on guilds i'm interested to see if anyone not guilded can participate yet as well.
I bet they just don't have the mercenary system up and running right yet.
I know it won't work this way forever, and you can try and be negative and say whatever you need to satisfy your internet ego. I would come back to this post in a while when it isn't working like this and revive it, but I really just don't care...
yeah there goes any fun for guilds with battle keeps to help storm (but not take) other guilds battlekeeps...have fun sitting in your keep defending constantly
Aye, best part of defending your base in AO was being able to seek revenge and attacking the other guilds base. Or attacking your attackers base while they were attacking you, having a war on 2 fronts and thinning thier ranks.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
I have a much easier solution to the problem. Restrict the number of members in a single guild to 100.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
No! The best idea is clearly as suggested to just wait two months while paying for the deity that is Funcom to fix this nonsens problem!
Yup, all part of the Funcom 'Build now, test later' philosophy.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
Working as intended, and not even remotely broken or unfair. There are only 8 keeps per server. Obviously, you want one guild to invite 10000 people and own all 8 of them, but real players do not want this.
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So the intended design was to let 8 guilds take 8 keeps and then sit on thier thumbs while waiting for other guilds to assult the keeps seeing as the guilds who have a keep cant even help another guild take down a keep?
Sounds like great fun...
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
So the intended design was to let 8 guilds take 8 keeps and then sit on thier thumbs while waiting for other guilds to assult the keeps seeing as the guilds who have a keep cant even help another guild take down a keep?
Sounds like great fun...
You played DAOC at launch when it had 3 keeps, didn't you? Nice troll attempt at salvage, but this thread is still epic fail.
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lol another "tiny" game design oversight from Funcom...
how come I'm not a tiny bit surprised
lol, just lol