Pre-Announcement: Siege Changes

[Zeler]

Hermits/small groups living under pclaim shouldn't be able to compete with large factions at all.

[ven]

Making ingame systems for treaties and bonds makes absolutely no sense. The only treaties and alliances that actually matter are the skype and trust based ones.

In-game reputation system? "Wars declared"? "Wars lost"? Are you serious? I don't think most PvPers want to roleplay so much that they will actually use these functions.

One rant goes against the other. If you don't have some way to ascertain some groups reliability, how can you make deals with them? In other words: how could new players reliably make eg vassalage deals with factions if they don't have access to skype groups or their history? These features of the game should be available for all, not just for the same old players.

The vassalage system idea is so stupid, it can never work, that's just not how people think.

That's how the devs used to think, as you can see in the kingdom's leak. Several major raiders, including ladygoo and some ainrans iirc, have also agreed with that. The resistance to the idea came mostly from a few hermits, not from raiders.

Secondly, I don't think you should invest particularly high hopes in the results of us introducing various global states that attempt to regulate conflict. What those do in my experience is to devolve the game into very gamey metagames revolving around those centralized and clumsy states. You set up false villages to create false alliances, phony "wars", &c, to achieve other actual ends, &c&c&c. No abstract, digital, modeled representation we provide can even begin to hope to describe or somehow fulfill the needs of the very analog and fluid social relations that actually exist between players in conflict with each other.

That's sad to hear. In other words, that's unfeasible because people would abuse it? I suppose that means no kingdom's update either?

[Uriel_Ventris]

I still think that the cost of destroying a personal claim totally undefended (no palisade, no people) is too excessive.

Assemble a whole siege to destroy the claim that an old hermit rode for days seems unrealistic.

PD: I dont like use "realism" in a game but...

[LadyGoo]

Sure but in the current state the action and drama belong to a select few groups only, the rest are just fodder for the fire. Hermits have no reason (or ability, really) to get involved with any such politics unless they are the victim.
I said it once before but there aren't any "good" raiders left out there, all we have now are the people looking to raid for loot rather than justice and I don't think that's a good place to be in.

Just because no-one posts about it, doesn't mean it's not happening. My faction went to help some russians under a siege as mercenaries (for a payment). We have also exterminated several people actively killing noobs in our area.
We have also tried using the tribute system with the local noob villages, but got bored of it quickly and let them be. They would constantly complain that 5 wax a week or 15 clover a day is unbearable and sets them back in development. But yeah, hermits were participating the politics in that sense and willing to pay the tribute. Once it was removed, we kind of stopped talking to them.

[Enjoyment]

People are just too unwilling to give up their safe (admittedly unraidable unless you stop ramchecking and such) way of gameplay.
Is it really that huge of a compromise to let a little bit of chaos ensue, for the sake of the development of the game? Are we just that keen on holding to our material (ingame -.-) possesions, at the cost of limiting what this game can become?

To put that question in another way, would you be pissed off at the devs if the game started out being an absolute clusterfuck of ganking and killing, and you knew what to expect from the very get go?

Why people should NOT be worry of their safety? There is already too many risks in game - you can loose any of your character out of your walls by some griefers, you could lost your lovely raised miner by troll, and all of your work could be destroyed if something fucked up and world resets. So whats wrong with having a hope for one safe piece of this world to call it home?
Im so confused of people, who uses tons of bots and "raises stat-caped chars in two days", and then says "we are already bored, Jorb - let us make some chaos". Stop using bots, bugs and exploits and try to play fairly, than you can see - there is aenough chaos around.

[jorb]

That's sad to hear. In other words, that's unfeasible because people would abuse it? I suppose that means no kingdom's update either?

Pretty much. When we attempt to digitalize relations down to simple states "war", "peace", "alliance", we miss a lot of the fullness of actual reality, where two factions can be, say "mildly friendly", or on a "could help them out if we got paid"-basis, or a thousand other highly fluid and hyper-variant possibilities. A village in the game is just an organizational tool, and there are plenty of scenarios under which actual factions -- human players acting in concert -- may decide that they need several villages, for example. Modeling a bunch of clumsy abstract states between villages creates huge rifts between objective reality and the games' abstract representation, and that will almost immediately create strangeness, ugliness and problems.

Oh, hai, we have three pseudo-villages in a state of formal "war" with our main village to accomplish obscure goal XYZ, and the like.

I mean, I am not going to exclude shit like that entirely. I think some sort of system of vassalization and formal tributes could perhaps be useful, but I do not suspect that the holy grail of a good siege and warfare system lies down those kinds of roads.

[strpk0]

People are just too unwilling to give up their safe (admittedly unraidable unless you stop ramchecking and such) way of gameplay.
Is it really that huge of a compromise to let a little bit of chaos ensue, for the sake of the development of the game? Are we just that keen on holding to our material (ingame -.-) possesions, at the cost of limiting what this game can become?

To put that question in another way, would you be pissed off at the devs if the game started out being an absolute clusterfuck of ganking and killing, and you knew what to expect from the very get go?

Why people should NOT be worry of their safety? There is already too many risks in game - you can loose any of your character out of your walls by some griefers, you could lost your lovely raised miner by troll, and all of your work could be destroyed if something fucked up and world resets. So whats wrong with having a hope for one safe piece of this world to call it home?
Im so confused of people, who uses tons of bots and "raises stat-caped chars in two days", and then says "we are already bored, Jorb - let us make some chaos". Stop using bots, bugs and exploits and try to play fairly, than you can see - there is aenough chaos around.

I find it funny that you picture me as a hardcore asshat bot abusing people murderer. Fancy a picture of what my base really is like (atleast this world)?


No, I'm just someone that legitimately wants this game to be fun and entertaining. And if I have to lose everything (which hilariously enough atm isn't much I know, but this hasn't been the case in previous worlds and my mindset didn't change at all) for the sake of this happening, then so be it.
You can get unlucky and end up living next to a bunch of no-goods that would like nothing more than to make your day shit as often as they possibly can, but that doesn't mean that it's the fault of the game, nor does it necessarily mean that it is "too chaotic".

[ven]

I see.

Oh, hai, we have three pseudo-villages in a state of formal "war" with our main village to accomplish obscure goal XYZ, and the like.

Wouldn't that behavior be minimized if formal states of war were costly, for example, making your authority drop dramatically? Or using the random numen-like item system mentioned before as a way to make that harder to circumvent by bots?

[Enjoyment]

Well, I mean, I'd love to help out with that if I can. The visitor debuff was a positive attempt in that direction, for example.

But I'm just not sure I can do much about some people playing the game very competitively, if that is your complaint. The environment is not such that a small group of friends playing casually on Sundays can somehow engage meaningfully in PvP with top factions, and I'm not sure the rules could even be bent in that kind of a direction even if I wanted to, as a lot of the competitiveness comes from fundamental things. You can join the game freely, spend as much time in it as you like, create as many characters as you like, &c. There are very few limits to how much will and energy you can direct at the game if you want to, and attempting to introduce such limits is far from trivial, and quickly becomes draconian.

I mean, I'm all ears to ideas, of course.

Give players a CHOISE how to play - make something for BSFs to make war with other BSFs. But this must be something hermits could be aware of. Just create the world with more cool resources in center and all will be happy - Big factions would have their wars in the middle and hermits could live they lives on the edges. When you decide you strong enough and bored a little - you just move little closer to the center - and here's next tier of your community life.

[Enjoyment]

I find it funny that you picture me as a hardcore asshat bot abusing people murderer. Fancy a picture of what my base really is like (atleast this world)?
No, I'm just someone that legitimately wants this game to be fun and entertaining. And if I have to lose everything (which hilariously enough atm isn't much I know, but this hasn't been the case in previous worlds and my mindset didn't change at all) for the sake of this happening, then so be it.

I wasn't talked about you, but I think most of people, who a praying for more chaos in this thread a like that (bots/bugs/exploits)