Camelot Unchained MMO

uniqueuser_sl said:

Not sure what relevance either of those assumptions have (except that neither game had hardcoded factions?), but Darkfall was dead on arrival and I played on Siege Perilous before Trammel was even a twinkle in Gordon Walton's eye, so neither were of any consequence to me.

The latter isn't a given if there's comparable incentive to play either side, and a two-faction environment by definition prevents the inevitability of cross-teaming leading to kingmaking scenarios, which is arguably even more demoralizing to the losing team because they've been defeated by opponents who've conspired against the game's own rules.

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Cross teaming to overcome a third faction was encouraged in DAOC and wasn't against the rules. Albion typically dominated population and if you wanted to play Mid or Hib you had to cooperate cross team to overcome that. It certainly led to Albion whinging when it worked but divide and conquer is a time old political strategy too. That dynamic came out organically like Grim is talking about.

Unless you are talking about having multiple accounts and 2 factions don't stop that so I'm guessing not.

Two factions almost never led to balanced servers and I've never seen an 'incentive to play either side' actually work. Instead what you see are people identifying servers where their preferred faction is having a population advantage and reinforcing it.

Grim1_sl said:

Are there any 2 faction games that didn't fail in the RvR arena? I don't recall. They may be very successful at PvE (WoW), but not in RvR. WarHammer and Aion were great games at first, but then the masses joined the winning side and the RvR fun ended. Aion still limps along but it's RvR is nonexistent and has been for years. I'm not saying it's impossible to make a decent 2 faction RvR game but it is much harder to get right.

GW2's WvW for all of it's faults, still has legs. 3 factions seem to help it quite a bit. 3 factions doesn't ensure success though (TESO). I think it just makes it easier on the devs to keep a bit of balance to the fights.

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On Gorfang it balanced out and was competitive for about 85% of the life of the game. After the last server merges it became almost unplayable. You know, once they let you have Order and Destruction on the same server. Before that it was a really good balance and would change from month to month. Sure, there was drama with people sacking the city at 5am or other people agreeing to not go out to fight against the zerg in order to get in to the city. Over all though the PVP was fairly balanced.

Hard coded factions are dumb. Give players tools to create robust guilds and alliances of guilds and then tools to manage people and alliances.

Toss that in with visual representation of territory control like a 4x map and in game score boards and you have yourself a good start.

So I got antsy and started reading their page and it says launch date of 2016, do you think it'll make it by end of the year or sooner? Anyone still playing have any input on that?

If it releases in 2017 and is functional I'll be impressed.

Draegan_sl said:

Hard coded factions are dumb. Give players tools to create robust guilds and alliances of guilds and then tools to manage people and alliances.

Toss that in with visual representation of territory control like a 4x map and in game score boards and you have yourself a good start.

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I always thought something like EQ's Velious faction system (with modifications) would work for RvR. Each faction had benefits, and it was a real pain to change sides for most players. There were ways to speed up faction change in Velious, but that would be easy to fix in an RvR game.

Draegan_sl said:

Hard coded factions are dumb. Give players tools to create robust guilds and alliances of guilds and then tools to manage people and alliances.

Toss that in with visual representation of territory control like a 4x map and in game score boards and you have yourself a good start.

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Then reality is dumb. We are born into nations and demographics and its a fact of life. There are certain dynamics associated with that. Recognizing it and manipulating it isn't dumb.

Youre one of the leaders around here so given that any game that comes out with your preferred paradigm you have a premade guild with a significant playerbase where you automatically are leader. You have an automatic advantage and it also serves to draw more people to you. Of course you would prefer it.

People that want to play solo or in small groups don't have that advantage so why would they be dumb to not want what you want?

Axamander_sl said:

Then reality is dumb. We are born into nations and demographics and its a fact of life. There are certain dynamics associated with that. Recognizing it and manipulating it isn't dumb.

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The difference is that in life you can change your affiliations and allegiances. This possibility lays the groundwork for stories of deceit and betrayal, for shifting politics that influence wars that can have a real impact on history.

Static factions prevent any of that from happening in a game. The player is locked into a choice made at character creation that defines the boundaries of his interactions with others. But most MMO worlds are already so rigid and unchangeable at every level that it doesn't really matter, I guess.

uniqueuser_sl said:

The difference is that in life you can change your affiliations and allegiances. This possibility lays the groundwork for stories of deceit and betrayal, for shifting politics that influence wars that can have a real impact on history.

Static factions prevent any of that from happening in a game. The player is locked into a choice made at character creation that defines the boundaries of his interactions with others. But most MMO worlds are already so rigid and unchangeable at every level that it doesn't really matter, I guess.

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You cannot change your demographics and emigration is not always possible. They still remain 'hard coded factions.'

trirealm tries to prevent overpop on any one realm, and in doing so normalizes fairness somewhat.
this is in conflict to openpvp which is far more immersive and albeit unfair often. (when you make an allegiance to another guild but then betray them, it means something more than the contrived hardcoded default 3factions. it builds a better identity for oneself/drama/community)

the majority of people (as seen on by the lower *dred population) are not willing make this sacrifice. they quantify the return on their time to positive experiences/numberofkills/etc. whereas openpvp tends to have a narrative-based return of drama/community that in turn builds identity/community.

when the pop goes down, theres 1/3 less ppl to fight adding to the prob. the eve-like drama is what lures ppl into playing the game (new subs goes up). closest thing that might happen is a dredlike server in the future -- heres hoping.

Axamander_sl said:

Then reality is dumb. We are born into nations and demographics and its a fact of life. There are certain dynamics associated with that. Recognizing it and manipulating it isn't dumb.

Youre one of the leaders around here so given that any game that comes out with your preferred paradigm you have a premade guild with a significant playerbase where you automatically are leader. You have an automatic advantage and it also serves to draw more people to you. Of course you would prefer it.

People that want to play solo or in small groups don't have that advantage so why would they be dumb to not want what you want?

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This a bad post and you should feel bad.

Real life analogies make for shitty game design conversations.

Draegan_sl said:

This a bad post and you should feel bad.

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So much irony.

RvR fanboy?

Grim1_sl said:

Are there any 2 faction games that didn't fail in the RvR arena? I don't recall. They may be very successful at PvE (WoW), but not in RvR. WarHammer and Aion were great games at first, but then the masses joined the winning side and the RvR fun ended. Aion still limps along but it's RvR is nonexistent and has been for years. I'm not saying it's impossible to make a decent 2 faction RvR game but it is much harder to get right.

GW2's WvW for all of it's faults, still has legs. 3 factions seem to help it quite a bit. 3 factions doesn't ensure success though (TESO). I think it just makes it easier on the devs to keep a bit of balance to the fights.

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Meh GW2 wvw runs into the same problem of bandwagons. They also use a continuous point scoring system which brought it's own set of problems the other games didn't have, namely coverage time gaps, which prx and their alliance took advantage of in the beginning. There's no mechanics in place for the 2nd and 3rd place teams to put pressure on 1st, so it just turns 1st and 2nd to prey on 3rd for the easy points and keep their position.

Warhammer, Daoc, Planetside, all worked to a degree, all weren't really about "scoring points", but rather capturing areas. The problem for most of these games is when they open the sides up and make it easier for the population to shift from side to side, then you get that group of players that only want to play on the winning side jumping all the time. Which gw2 blew apart when they offered free transfers for months in the beginning and then $10 accounts and then free accounts so everyone has an account or 20 sitting around on every server. Future games like CU need to keep a closer eye on population caps for factions, and have a strict policy on switching sides. These games require population balance to be enjoyable, but the devs don't seem to ever take that seriously enough, maybe with CU's subs it will make switching more difficult to do (I know multi accounts etc etc shrug).

There really hasn't been a proper pvp MMO made in the last 10 years. Most of them have had plenty of PVE shit attached to it since the majority, if not all, were gear based.

When Warhammer was being developed they repeatedly said three factions was a problem in DAoC and Warhammer would fix those problems. It did fix problems but new ones developed so it's kind of the lesser of two evils. If you use Warhammer and Alterac Valley in WoW for example both turned into giant stalemates and eventually developers introduced mechanics that fixed that but also meant fighting other players was less of a focus. Take GW2, DAoC, or any 3+ faction game and there's no longer a stalemate, the way you win or lose isn't always fair but at least you win or lose in a decent amount of time.

Draegan_sl said:

This a bad post and you should feel bad.

Real life analogies make for shitty game design conversations.

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You should feel bad for saying that what I said about you is an analogy.

You ARE one of the leaders of Rerolled. You HAVE a premade guild in which you ARE a leader. You HAVE a built in advantage in a FFA environment.

That is not an analogy. It's an observation of fact. I'm not calling you out as some qualitative generalization beyond self interest and we all have that.

^ Lol what? Who bitch this is?

The fuck is going on in this thread?

Looking at their website makes me kinda sad -DAOC was easily my favorite MMO of all time, but I'm not holding my breath with this one. Putting aside the low quality of the media they're showing so farm DAOC was a product of it's time and the things that made it such an amazing pvp experience (primarily the high skill cap and class design which allowed co-ordinated smaller groups to stand a chance against large zergs, preventing it from becoming a mindless, back and forth numbers game and allowing small roaming groups to coexist with larger zergs in the same pvp space) just wouldn't be tolerated in the modern MMO market.

Axamander_sl said:

You should feel bad for saying that what I said about you is an analogy.

You ARE one of the leaders of Rerolled. You HAVE a premade guild in which you ARE a leader. You HAVE a built in advantage in a FFA environment.

That is not an analogy. It's an observation of fact. I'm not calling you out as some qualitative generalization beyond self interest and we all have that.

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I don't have a pre made guild. I play with PRX when they let me. Im pretty casual these days.

EVE model is the best model when it comes to player interaction .